Queen Elizabeth II will be welcomed to the Republic next week by Ireland's largest immigrant community: the British. RONAN MCGREEVYasks a number of prominent residents about their decision to live here
EVERY SCHOOLCHILD IN Ireland is taught that the British first arrived here in 1169 at the request of Dermot MacMurrough, the deposed king of Leinster. With the fabled 800 years of oppression behind us, and 90 years after independence, it is not generally appreciated that the British are still here, and remain our most significant and yet silent minority.
Many Irish people might guess that Poles make up the biggest immigrant community here, followed by residents from the Baltic States and then, perhaps, China and Nigeria. So good have the British been at assimilating that it is something of a secret that they are the largest non-native group living in the Republic.
In the 2006 census, 112,548 people gave their nationality as British, along with another 13,000 who described themselves as Irish-English. That’s more than all the immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia combined. According to the census there are nearly 300,000 UK-born residents in the Republic, although this may include those born in Northern Ireland and second-generation Irish who were born in the UK, but consider themselves Irish.
Much has been written about the Irish in Britain and their influence on British life, but per head of population there are three times as many British in Ireland (3 per cent) as there are Irish in Britain (1.2 per cent). You’d never think it, however. There are no Dog and Duck pubs where the British can pine for Blighty over a half of warm bitter, there is no British equivalent of the Kilburn High Road, and fish and chip shops here are more likely to be owned by locals or Italians.
“One doesn’t like the place one lives in to be populated with too many people. This is about escaping the English,” the English law lord Anthony Lester replied when asked about the attractions of west Cork.
Indeed, one place you cannot escape the English is west Cork. It may not come as a surprise that Kinsale, the erstwhile home of the flamboyant celebrity chef Keith Floyd, is the most British town in Ireland, where nearly one in 10 residents is from the UK. It may, however, surprise you to learn that one resident in 20 in Co Leitrim is British.
The British are here for many reasons. A large number arrived from 1996 onwards: in the 10 years that followed, 80,000 UK-born residents set up home in Ireland. The booming Irish economy attracted the Auf Wiedersehen, Pet set of British construction workers as assuredly as it did the managerial classes. However, it is unlikely that many of Queen Elizabeth’s erstwhile subjects will be lining the streets, Union Jacks in hand, for her visit next week.
There was a revealing report about British emigration published five years ago by the Institute of Public Policy Research. It found that 5.5 million British people had left the UK over the past 40 years, a full 10 per cent of the population. The figure was described as “staggering”. But you never hear them complain. The British regard emigration as a lifestyle choice, not an economic imperative.
The report found, unsurprisingly, that the British assimilate easily into their host communities, and while they retain a sense of their national identity, it does not translate into a “sense of collective identity while abroad”.
“In our research, we found that English people, in particular, melt in wherever they go, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, one of the authors of the report said at the time. “One English person told us that he literally feels invisible and that’s a pattern which we have identified in most places.”
Actor Alan Stanford has lived in Ireland since 1969. “There are two main types: those who remain English, Scottish, Welsh or whatever and there are those like me who have gone native and don’t give a damn about the royal visit. I’m a republican, but I can well understand why monarchy suits the English and I think the queen’s decision to go to the Garden of Remembrance is a hugely significant gesture.”
In his hilarious farce Improbable Frequency, author Arthur Riordan imagines the advice given to the poet John Betjeman before he took up his alleged post as a British spy in Dublin during the second World War. “Well, be careful not to patronise the Irish/They take umbrage at the kindliest advice/Though it’s clearly for his benefit/Dear old Paddy’s having none of it.”
There are, however, several internet threads for British expatriates where they get to air their true feelings. “There is no hostility nowadays towards English or anyone from UK. That seems to have pretty much died with the 1990s,” writes one west Cork resident in a recent thread to be countered by another expatriate who wrote that there was “resistance unconsciously to the English still”.
One of the more informative sources is the parenting site magicmum.com, where a long-running thread has given English mothers living in Ireland the chance to say what they really think of us.
Although most are happy, many find the parochialism of small-town Irish life suffocating – “like going from a zoo to a birdcage” – and others find the in-your-face nature of Irish family life overpowering. Most can hardly believe you have to pay for a doctor, especially for children, and they vow to never criticise the NHS again.
A recurring theme is about the fabled friendliness of the Irish: contributors claim it is hard to break into the networks that Irish people have established for themselves.
In the end, though, the British who are here have the same ambivalent feelings about this country as the rest of us have. “Different,” is how TV3’s director of programming Ben Frow describes Ireland. “Part of me loves it and part of me gets quite frustrated by it. It can be quite parochial sometimes. It is very small. Its smallness really shocked me. Sometimes I want to shake this country. The other half of me loves the freedom, the people and the landscape.”
MATTHEW ELDERFIELD
The British viceroys in Ireland had plenty of power, but few would have had the effrontery to face down Ireland’s wealthiest man, Sean Quinn, as the financial regulator Matthew Elderfield did.
Elderfield’s decision to confront Quinn over his disastrous punt on Anglo-Irish shares and put the Quinn Group into administration was not popular with its owner or staff, but he was subsequently vindicated.
“To my mind, it was a pretty cut and dried case of a firm with very clear and persistent solvency problems,” he says, recalling the decision that has bolstered his reputation as the sheriff sent in to clean up Dodge City. For those who championed Elderfield’s appointment, here was proof that it was necessary to appoint an outsider to replace Patrick Neary.
The financial regulator is a proud Yorkshireman, a place where people are renowned for their canniness with money. “For my sins I’m a Leeds [United] fan,” he says of the city of his birth, although he did move to New York when he was nine, which explains his curious mid-Atlantic accent.
Elderfield took up his role as the financial regulator in 2009 having been the financial regulator in Bermuda for two years. In doing so, he left a balmy, tropical paradise for a grey, rainy and crisis-torn island that had earned a reputation as the “wild west of finance”. Moreover, he moved for just over half the money he was on. Why?
“People ask me that question all the time,” he says. He explains that the state of the Irish banking system was a challenge, it was a chance to put his stamp on things, and it was nice living in a big or at least bigger country where he was closer to friends and family.
“I liked Bermuda, the weather was lovely. I also lived in New York and London, but Dublin is a great city and I love living here,” he says.
He and his wife Margaret enjoy the restaurants, going to the O2 and the Olympia and walking in Wicklow when they get a chance. He intends to see out his five-year contract here: “That would be the goal.”
He never expected a quiet life but the scale of interest in what he does in what was once the arcane world of financial regulation has taken him by surprise. “Embarrassingly, yes, I do get stopped in the street,” he says. “Everybody has a keen interest in what is happening in the banks and in the Quinn Group.
“There was a difficult period last year. A lovely lady from Co Mayo wrote me a letter inviting me to come for some strong Irish tea and some homemade apple cakes so I shared that with all the staff and it gave us a bit of a boost,” he says.
“People have been very welcoming and very hospitable and very encouraging, irrespective of where I came from and my background.”
He already met the queen while working in Bermuda and has an invitation to meet her in Ireland. “Ironically, I need to be in London for a banking conference. Work takes priority I’m afraid.”
PAUL COOK
Sligo Rovers manager Paul Cook had a varied career as a well-travelled midfielder before taking up football management. He joined Sligo in 2007 after a less than successful period with Conference side Southport near his native Liverpool.
His tenure at Sligo has been a success, culminating in a never-to-be-forgotten victory in the FAI Cup in front of 36,000 fans last season. Nevertheless, Cook is well aware of the vagaries of the territory, which is why his family and five-year-old son are back in Liverpool. “With football management you wouldn’t want to put your kid in a school and 12 months later you get the sack,” he says.
His ultimate goal is to move back to England, where the rewards are better, and to be closer to his family. “I love Ireland. I think it is a fantastic country. It is a completely different way of life to England. It is a lot more of a sociable place, but the day has come closer when I want to go home. Once upon a time I was very happy in Sligo, but four years seems like a long time.” He confesses to having “tunnel vision” when it comes to the queen’s visit. “I’m a working-class lad from Liverpool. I’m not political at all. As far as things like that are concerned, I don’t really have time to think about it.”
TRACY PIGGOTT
In an opinion piece for this newspaper several weeks ago, Irish-born BBC journalist Joe Lynam asked why there were no English accents on Irish television to match the Irish accents on British television.
In fact there are several, and one of the most notable emanates from Tracy Piggott. The daughter of the legendary jockey Lester Piggott arrived in Ireland in 1986 to work on Tommy Stack’s stud farm in Wexford. Her early years in Ireland were overshadowed by her father’s jailing for tax evasion and her mother’s recovery from a serious riding accident. However, she auditioned for RTÉ in 1989 and has been there ever since. “I feel very fortunate living here,” she says. “It just suits my character and my personality so well. Whenever I’m coming back to Ireland from abroad I get that really emotional feeling that I’m coming home again and it still happens.”
The queen is to visit the Irish National Stud, near Piggott’s Co Kildare home, but she is not on the guestlist. “I met her when she gave my father the OBE, before she took it back again,” she jokes, referring to the decision to strip her father of his gong after his conviction.
NORMA SMURFIT
Norma Smurfit has made a considerable contribution to Irish life.
She first arrived in Ireland with her husband Michael Smurfit in 1966, when the Smurfit empire was comparatively small. She has been here so long most people think of her as one of our own, but she is “Cockney born and bred” to a left-wing Jewish family in north London.
“When Ireland are playing England I cheer for Ireland, but I still have a British passport. There’s not a drop of Irish blood in me,” she says.
Now 72, she has never relented in her philanthropic endeavours. She remains the chair of First Step, the charity she set up in 1991 to help small businesses get off the ground. She is still involved with the Irish Famine Commemoration Fund, an umbrella fund created to benefit the homeless and disadvantaged youth, which she set up in 1998. She commissioned and donated the haunting Rowan Gillespie Famine sculpture at Custom House Quay in Dublin.
“It keeps me off the street,” she says of her charitable work. “I don’t play golf or bridge, but I like to be busy and get up early in the morning.”
She has an invitation from the British embassy to meet Queen Elizabeth, but no time or place has been given. “I’ll go along, do the bob and shake the hand if I get the chance, but I suspect there will be 400 others there with a similar idea.”
BEN FROW
Once described by the now BBC director-general Mark Thompson as “one of the most imaginative and original commissioners in Britain”, Londoner Ben Frow came trailing clouds of glory when he joined TV3 in June 2007 as director of programming.
He held similar roles in Channel 4 and Five and was responsible for enduring hits such as Property Ladder and Location, Location, Location. Frow has cut a flamboyant figure in the small world of Irish television and TV3 has prospered despite the recession, with ratings winners such as X Factor and The Apprentice, and he has expanded the range of indigenous programming.
His sound instincts were vindicated by TV3’s huge daytime audience for its saturation coverage of the royal wedding. “A part of me thought this might backfire on us, but I decided to go big on it because everybody loves a big wedding.”
There won’t be a repeat performance for the royal visit. “I feel very passionately about it. I’m an English person working in a department of republicans, but I think we have to be slightly more measured about it. In a way, I think it is more appropriate with RTÉ.”
