Walking through the Irish Emigration Museum on a recent visit to Dublin, I was stopped in my tracks at the section covering the 1980s.
This was a period when then taoiseach Charles Haughey berated us that we were living beyond our means. Tánaiste Brian Lenihan snr extolled the benefits of emigration: “We can’t all live on a small island.”
He described high Irish emigration as natural rather than a systemic failure, suggesting a “global generation” of Irish people. It seemed that these politicians were very eager to discard a whole generation of Irish young people, glibly encouraging us to leave and relieve the rest of the populace of financial pressures.
I was one of that generation. I emigrated from Limerick City in 1983 as a 23-year-old with a Social Science degree from UCD. I had no job, no income and, I thought, no prospects. I had an idea that I would go on a little trip to New Jersey and return.
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Forty-two years later, I am still in New Jersey. I eventually earned a PhD, had a university career, got married and have two grown children.
But along the way there were years of waitressing jobs, and interrogation by emigration officials on my return after family funerals. There were also far too many missed events in Ireland to count on my fingers – Christmases, weddings and hurling finals.
There were years of loneliness and cultural disconnect – the in-between status of straddling two national identities.
My decades in the US have brought me many joys, however, and the life that opened up for me here was so much more diverse than if I had stayed.
The Ireland I left was a very different place. It was so white and Catholic that, growing up, I never met anyone who wasn’t both of those things.
Here, I married an African-American man. We have raised two children who identify as biracial. All of this opened a rich world of racial and ethnic identity that was not available to me in Limerick in the 1960s and 1970s.
When I arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1983, I had no problem finding my tribe and a job. The mile square city on the Hudson river was teeming with newly arrived Irish young people. I lived in a converted factory loft with two young American women paying $300 ( a month for a room. My Irish emigrant cousin helped me put up the dividing sheet rock to make my own bedroom.
My accent brought me lots of goodwill and good fortune. I was hired in a restaurant owned by an Irish-American. I brought my brother into the local Irish pub. Here, he was told he could get a job as a construction site foreman, even though he had never set foot on a building site before.
That warm acceptance did not always extend to my husband and later to my children. Sadly, this made integrating a sense of Irish ethnic identity a little trying with my son and daughter.
The first time my husband came with me to Limerick in 1989, two boys in the street by my mother’s house were so startled that they pointed at him, started laughing and ran away.
The young Irish people who are leaving now seem more confident, better equipped for the transition they face. I applaud their courage
A neighbour wanted to run her fingers through his hair because she wondered what a black man’s hair felt like.
As times have changed in Ireland, our visits have become less fraught and uncomfortable.
However, even those non-threatening encounters seem quaint now, considering recent protests against and attacks on emigrants and people of colour in Ireland. I am also buoyed by the accepting attitude of the majority of young Irish people towards the increased diversity of their classmates, whom they see as friends.
I write from my home in the seaside New Jersey city of Asbury Park, famous for its Bruce Springsteen connection. The Asbury beach does not quite have the sweeping wildness of Kilkee, but it’s a good contender.
I am recently retired, and as I look back, I know I wouldn’t change my experiences of emigration. But it’s not without its “what ifs” or its ambivalences. Leaving was not a choice, but a necessity. We did as my mother and her generation advised us to, and “just got on with it”.
So it’s heartbreaking to read about the departure of so many of the current Irish generation, spurred this time by the housing crisis rather than the unemployment crisis of my time.
[ Immigration ‘makes the United States what it is’, Boston-Irish audience toldOpens in new window ]
But the young Irish people who are leaving now seem more confident, better equipped for the transition they face. I applaud their courage. Mostly, I applaud their parents, because unlike in the 1980s, I don’t think parents these days accept the narrative that their children have no choice but to leave Ireland.
A present-day politician could not so comfortably advocate Lenihan’s small-island notions and “accept the loss” philosophy. People want their children to be able to stay in the country they were born in. This should be a parent’s right, not a privilege. We can do better.
Margaret O’Donoghue, from Limerick, emigrated in 1983 and lives in New Jersey where she is married with two grown-up children. She recently retired from her university job as a social work professor.
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