Having taken a visit to the East Midlands region of England last weekend, I was struck by how easily I forgot that I wasn’t in Ireland. The signs were there, but hard to grasp, like a shift in the breeze: drivers diligently stuck to speed limits, front gardens I passed were suspiciously well groomed and the toaster queues at my hotel breakfast were remarkably orderly and lacking in elbows.
This unusual feeling of being Irish in England is something Hugo Harvey touches on in his column. “The particular anxiety of being Irish in London is the proximity of British identity. London is an international city, a melting pot, but the British capital is still the British capital. For Irish people, there might be a nagging fear that if you are not paying attention, you might be assimilated; mistaken for British, or worse, not minding whether you are.”
Making England home is not always straightforward for Irish people. It has often been a place of safety, including for many LGBTQ+ emigrants. But the Aids crisis brought complexities to this refuge, which are examined in an Irish play that premiered in London last month.
It was created by two Cork natives, playwright Amy Clarke and actor Derek Murphy, with assistance from the Emigrant Support Programme. It tells the untold true stories of the Irish during the 1980s Aids crisis in London.
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We spoke to Murphy and Clarke earlier this year. “We are all familiar with the stories, but you never hear about it from an Irish point of view,” Murphy said.
The Irish have been coming and going from England for generations, but Birmingham resident Robert Murphy writes of something that took him by surprise: “Despite the strong historic links, many people here seem to know little about Ireland. They often seem to be less interested in us than we are in them. I am not sure why this is. It may be a quirk of the relationship between a small country and a large one.”
It’s something that made him lean in to his Irishness: “I have a newfound enjoyment of Irish traditional music, I read Irish news every day and stay connected with literature,” he writes.
The relationship with the Irish language as a child and as an emigrant is something that London-based Laura Kennedy reflects on in her column. Irish “was entangled in a thick mesh of obligation, Catholicism and citizenship. It was a rote-learned procession of refrains written and recited for exam practice; less a window into a culture and history and more a series of noises you made with your face to pass an oral exam and get out of dodge”.
Now she has begun to learn it again: “It is pleasant, though, to uncover the secret knowledge I had presumed lost, buried so deep in my mind that it had been abandoned with the muscle memory entailed in how to use a hula hoop. It’s nice to recall that you can recall a fox is called a ‘sionnach’, and to find the shape of lost words forming in your mouth. It’s nice to be able to lift the weight of a grudge off the shoulders of that angry younger self, and to simply say ‘itheann an madra mo geansaí’,” she writes.
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