My mother’s four daughters are divided across the globe

Since the age of 15 I have been flying back and forth between the two islands of Britain and Ireland. My heart is forever torn in two.

Born in England to an Irish mother and an English father, I am the second of four daughters. I grew up in a Thames-side town in one of London's Home Counties, until moving to my mother's homeland of Ireland at the age of 15. After five years of school and college in the Emerald Isle, and countless flights across the Irish and Celtic Seas, I now live in London.

Aside from visiting the white sand dune shores of Wexford most years as a child to visit my grandparents, my own migration journey began when I begged my mother to send me away to boarding school. So my mother set aside some funds and off I went to boarding school in Co Cork.

Taking Aer Lingus flights in my dark green school uniform, the air stewards would say "you've got the best of both worlds''. But I felt I didn't have the best of either; with one foot in each, I was Irish in England and English in Ireland.

A year later at the end of the summer of 1999, my parents and sisters followed me to Ireland. We bought and renovated a large Georgian house in a small town south of Cork City.

Our first Christmas in Ireland was at the turn of the century. The Celtic Tiger was rising, yet this new opportunity for a fresh start in my mother’s homeland brought with it much conflict to our cultural identity.

In England as our mother’s children we were seen as Irish, with our dark hair and pale skin. “How Celtic your daughters look,’’ my mother was often told by friends and strangers alike. But now, my sisters and I were four new faces in a small Irish town, and our somewhat refined (and perhaps intimidating) English accents were all some people could hear.

Growing up, my mother ensured we were fully informed of Ireland’s bloody history at the hands of British rule. There is much to sympathise with, but being judged by our accents showed the small minded ignorance of a small town, the town my mother had once called home. It was ironic, considering my mother had experienced the same in reverse when she left Cork for England in the 1970s at the age of 19.

I left for London myself at the age of 20, in the autumn of 2003. In 2007 my mother paved the way for one of my sisters to attend college in Sydney, and my youngest sister followed soon after, leaving my eldest sister behind in Cork.

What was only meant to be a year down under for my sisters turned into two, and then another, and another. It has now been almost a decade, and my mother's four daughters are still divided across the globe. She joined them in Australia for two years, but had to return to Ireland when her visa ran out.

My two younger sisters are now full Australian residents and have made the country their home. Irish-born and introduced to Australia at the age of four, my nephew is now fully “Australianised”, yet insists on being called “Irish Australian”. It is wonderful that he is so proud of the land of his birth and his blood.

My elder sister lives in Dublin, and my mother, after sacrificing so much to educate each one of us , now lives in Cork without a single one of her four daughters. This breaks my heart every day.

I now live in a prosperous, leafy north London suburb, but my heart still pulls me back to Ireland. My commitments in London and the lack of opportunity for me workwise in Ireland prevent it, however. The pain of being apart from my family because of emigration surges through me each and every day; only those who experience it can truly understand.

We were all finally reunited the summer before last for the first time in almost five years, for what felt like only a few moments. But what is the alternative for us? Some might ask why we didn’t all just return to England, but my mother was not ready to leave Ireland again, and we had left some unhappy memories behind.

Australia seems to draw many abroad, with sunshine, space, and economic opportunity, and with fond memories of having lived there for a year as a child, I always thought that I might one day move there too. But I have put that dream aside, and now I only dream of returning to Ireland. Two of my sisters are living the Australian dream, but it’s a dream with a deeply sad undertone - of the family they have left behind, and the ever present pain of emigration heartache.

That scene in Brooklyn where all the mothers wave goodbye with hankies in hand as the ship leaves the harbour, pulled tears from my heart like no other film has ever done. The bitter-sweet remedy of emigration is so entrenched in our history, but the green heart of the Irish emigrant will always cry for the mothers we leave behind.