Modern lives are increasingly shown through a curated Instagram lens or distorted through an AI filter. Finding authenticity has become more difficult. But for Irish people living abroad, the challenge of perception and reality has always been there. It existed when letters home were the main form of communication and a move to Australia was permanent. Whether it’s the perfect life that left-behind relatives imagine emigrants are living or homesick Irish emigrants belting out nostalgic songs of home in a distant pub. It is captured in the old Irish seanfhocail ‘is glas iad na cnoic i bhfad uainn’ (faraway hills are greener).
The challenge of reality and perception was at the heart of one of the most-read stories on Irish Times Abroad over the past month. Irishman Cormac McConville, who has been living in Sydney since 2011, writes about the reality of life for people settling long term: “Sydney is wonderful. And many of the cliches are accurate, from the gorgeous weather to the laid-back coffee culture. But there is a big difference between just living in Sydney and building a life here. And the housing costs are one of the biggest factors. The bottom line is, it’s bloody hard to afford anything here – and there is no sign of this changing any time soon.”
For Laura Kennedy, reflecting on her first visit home after two years, the distortion was not distance, but the rare presence of the sun: “The sun does have a way of bleaching the world clean; yellowing everything over with an irresistible sentimentality. It can make a visit home dangerous, that amnesiac light. It can erase all awareness of why you ever left and stoke a yearning that almost makes you forget the frictions that drove you from home in the first place. There is nothing as frictionless as arriving back in Dublin on a cheerily sunny summer day, to find the air smelling of cut grass and the sea, and good friends waiting for you with smiling faces.”
For second-generation Irish writer Laura McDonagh, the idea of coming “home” would arise every summer, travelling to spend three weeks in her parents’ native west of Ireland, though her “home” was the north of England. “It’s only recently that the linguistic specificity has struck me: how we’d talk about going ‘home’ or ‘back’ to Sligo. The word ‘holiday’ – conjuring sunloungers, stripy towels and an all-inclusive buffet – simply didn’t fit. And even now, more than 30 years later, these formative experiences mean that I find the conventions of a Jet2-advert-style holiday – pools, palm trees, drinks with little umbrellas – somewhat alien. Since having my own kids I’ve done them, but they don’t come naturally to me,” McDonagh writes.
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There is a distortion problem too for the thousands of Irish living in the Gulf. Dubai is known to many for its glamour and its skyscrapers as well as its generous tax relief. One Irish woman in the city told Irish Times Abroad it sometimes feels like Barbieland. But as the US conflict with Iran enters a new phase, with the Gulf states caught in the crosshairs, some Irish abroad are considering an exit plan. With governments in the region keen to protect the image, and with strict laws on media in place, it can be hard to really know what’s going on. What is clear is that some of the shine has gone off the Dubai dream.
But for Irish abroad who hail from Ballina to Crossmolina, believing the reality in front of their eyes was a challenge when Mayo lifted the Sam Maguire for the first time in 75 years. As Angela O’Neill in England told us after the All-Ireland final: “The closer it got to the whistle the more I sobbed, and I couldn’t believe when it was over that we had actually won. I couldn’t stop crying even when it was over.” Creid é.
