Irish abroad offer warnings as mass emigration recommences

EMIGRATION:WITH A resurgence in emigration around 1980, one Irish emigrant wrote to taoiseach Charles Haughey about what she said was an increase in discrimination against Irish people in England.

Maria Baldwin (née Brennan), an Irish emigrant who was a registered nurse living in Lancashire, wrote a letter to Mr Haughey in August 1980 which is contained in the taoiseach’s files.

Irish citizens were being “victimised and discriminated against”, she said. While the Irish had always been treated as second-class citizens, she continued, “the situation has now become much worse”. British newspapers, she added, were giving plenty of publicity to large Irish families living on the dole.

A job application of hers was rejected before she was even interviewed, she wrote, noting that she was required to state her place of birth on her application. “This is a nice part of the country but the natives are very narrow-minded and bigoted and anti-Irish,” she wrote.

A reply from the taoiseach’s office advised her to take legal advice or complain to the Commission for Racial Equality if she had evidence of discrimination.

In a further letter in September, Ms Baldwin said that Irish nurses were being recruited to the “hardest and heaviest wards” and that senior posts were reserved for English-born workers.

It was “impossible for Irish people to obtain employment” in her area and she had heard people saying that the Irish should not be given work, she wrote.

A front-page report in The Irish Timesin August 1980 noted the changing migration pattern under the headline: "Emigration starts again, 26,536 left last year". The article noted evidence from the Central Statistics Office to suggest that emigration had restarted "after a lapse of many years", with the highest outflow since 1967.

The anti-Irish sentiment described by Ms Baldwin was clearly evident in the early 1970s, as demonstrated in a letter from a H Whitfield in Cheshire, “Merrie Englande”, to taoiseach Liam Cosgrave in 1973. Mr Whitfield said his child recently told him that the “Eireans”, as he termed them, appeared “to know everything except the way home”. He asked what was the reason for so many Irish people living in Britain, adding: “You can’t blame it on a spud famine and blame it on the English”.

He also asked why the government did not “imbue this unprincipled, characterless lot with some real love of their country instead of them wandering the world blaming their misfortune on everybody but the right culprit”.

He noted that the importation of rosary beads and Virgin Mary statues was “playing havoc with our balance of payments”.

He urged the government to let women use the contraceptive pill in order, he contended, that there would be fewer “conventeducated” prostitutes in England.

Accompanying the letter was an anti-immigration pamphlet from the British Movement, which stated: “Make Britain a no go area”, with the words “one million Eireans” scrawled underneath.

Many letters from Irish expatriates released in the taoiseach’s file on emigration also dated back to the early 1970s.

A 1972 letter from Edward Andrew Boyle, an Irish potato-picker in Scotland, asked the government to help potato-pickers secure better terms and conditions, including wages of £3.50 a day.

In February 1972, an Irish emigrant in London, Kathleen Cotter, wrote to taoiseach Jack Lynch asking him to make a public announcement on television asking all Irish men and women to return to their own country “where work will be found for them”.

“I grieve for our Irish men and women who are giving their youth and honest labour to a country [England] who only see them as second-rate citizens,” she wrote.

An Irish migrant in Sydney, Australia, wrote to the taoiseach in 1971 advising potential Irish emigrants of the problems there. If people moved to Australia, he wrote, they would be going “from the frying pan into the fire”.

An expatriate who planned to return to Ireland after 20 years in Australia and New Zealand to set up a horse-training facility in Co Kildare wrote to Mr Cosgrave offering to train a horse for him.

PJ Lynch, of the Shamrock Stud in Auckland, enclosed references with his letter. He had written to Mr Lynch in 1972 enclosing a photo of himself.

Mr Cosgrave’s secretary replied that “while he appreciates your offer, he does not propose to make any change in his existing arrangements for the training of horses”.