State's 'neglect' of Irish in Britain criticised

Hostility to Irish emigrants in England was until very recently compounded by "the myopia of the Irish state and the neglect displayed towards them by their homeland", a British MP has told the Parnell Summer School.

Mr John McDonnell, a Labour MP who is also chairman of the Anglo-Irish Parliamentary Group, said Ireland had "romanticised" an image of emigration but in the experience of many who emigrated to England, the reality had been much more harsh.

The Irish "are the only migrants to Britain whose life expectancy falls", he said, because they "lived and still live in some of the worst housing conditions in Britain"; "worked and still work in some of the hardest manual jobs"; and "experienced and still experience isolation and extremes of poverty, especially in old age".

They also suffered "cultural denigration . . .with the same images of the Irish as a sub-human species being deployed in the media in the 1980s as they were in Parnell's time".

Mr McDonnell continued: "The question for many of us is that when all this was happening to the Irish in Britain, where was the Irish homeland? In particular, where was the Irish state, and indeed where is it now?

"If the hands of successive Irish governments were tied at that time in tackling the economic exploitation of the Irish migrant to Britain, then it still had a voice with which to challenge and protest against the racist abuse of the Irish in the media and the treatment of Irish people by the judicial system. This voice was at best muted," he said.

Mr McDonnell was officially opening the summer school, which began yesterday and continues at Avondale, Co Wicklow until Friday.

Those attending last night also heard the keynote address, given by novelist and playwright Colm Tóibín.

Mr Tóibín's talk, on "The Art of Being Found Out", probed the theme of the double lives led by four Irish nationalists in Victorian times: Parnell, Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement, and Lady Gregory, and how in the cases of the first three, their parallel lives had driven them to destruction.

Even Lady Gregory, whose secret extramarital love affair could have ruined her, seemed compelled to make it public, if only through her clearly autobiographical love sonnets.

The other three, however, paid a heavy price for the urge to resolve the "doubleness and duplicity" at the heart of their lives.

Mr Tóibín said all three "took astonishing risks, leaving constant clues about who they really were".

That all three were Irish Protestants who had embraced Irish nationalism may help explain all of this, but not fully.

The explanation lies "in the strangeness of the human personality when placed under certain pressures, the lovely mystery of being alive".