Many older emigrants see Ireland through a green-tinted lens, but will today’s diaspora have a different view of their cultural identity?
NÍL AON tinteán, mar do thinteán féin. There’s no place like home. And with St Patrick’s Day just days away, many’s the pint of plain will be downed in celebration of this homeland of ours.
As the Irish economy shifts into a different gear, the numbers leaving to find work and opportunities is on the up again. Preliminary figures from the Central Statistics Office estimate that last year over 45,000 people emigrated, joining the millions who have already left Ireland behind in a long history of departures.
But for those going in new droves to seek employment or adventure, will the grass be ever greener in the old country? Not necessarily, says Peter Creedon, who left Ireland for what he intended to be a year away more than 10 years ago. He finally returned in 2008, after almost a decade in the US and a year in Australia. Cork-born Creedon doesn’t see it as a homecoming. “I kind of consider New York home, because I grew up a lot there,” he says. “I think I came of age there.”
During his time abroad, he made American friends, and got involved in American activities – “watching baseball, basketball, the whole thing” – but he never lost his connection to Ireland. “I still read the paper every day online . . . Some of me was still at home, but I was blending into my surroundings.”
So much so that he now sounds more Westside than West Cork, and peppers his speech with American slang. “Because of my job, I had to lose my accent a little. In a five-star restaurant, even if you’re bar-tending, you can’t have a thick Irish accent,” he explains. Modifying his accent also helped him avoid repeated conversations about “the old country” with Irish Americans. “We’d have the same conversation, over and over again,” he recalls. “Some of them would say ‘Oh you’re Irish? I’m Irish too!’ And they wouldn’t know any goddamn thing about Ireland.”
According to Prof Brian Jackson, Director of the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at UCD, the importance of the Irish diaspora to Ireland’s cultural and political history should not be underestimated. “An emigrant contribution and exile has had a significant role in shaping or crafting [the irish] identity.”
Exile or emigration can also change how Ireland is perceived by those born there, as distance allows those who leave to reshape and reimagine what they have left behind.
Colette Grant, who moved to Australia in January 2001, describes how her own notion of Ireland was altered by being abroad. “You do have an ideal of Ireland,” she says. “You long for it, you put it up on a pedestal.”
After five-and-a-half years in Australia, she found her Irish identity becoming even more pronounced. “You become very patriotic. I would never consider myself patriotic now, living back in Ireland, but when you’re away you’re drawn to other Irish people, you’re drawn to Irish places, and while you should be living in the moment, you’re clinging onto Ireland while you’re away.”
This idealisation of home is nothing new to Ireland, where, as Jackson puts it “coming and going is a constant theme”, and has even gone on to affect the course of its history. He cites the influence that the emigrant community in London, Manchester, New York and Chicago had on the republican movement in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Nowadays, this nostalgia for home may be less linked to a fight for independence, but it still lends itself to a degree of romanticisation of which Caoimh McCarthy, originally from Limerick but now living in Brighton, England, is acutely aware. “I find myself falling into that trap of saying, ‘Oh Ireland’s wonderful, it’s all fantastic at home,’” she admits. “I get quite defensive as well, because a lot of people in Brighton don’t get the history, or they assume Belfast is next to Cork.”
She even finds herself reminiscing about things that she would never bother with were she still living in her home town of Limerick. “I miss the Ray D’Arcy show,” she laughs. “I don’t even listen to Ray D’Arcy when I’m at home!”
THAT DISCONNECT between what you fondly recall of home and the reality that awaits you there is only made apparent on return, as Grant found when she moved back to Ireland two years ago. “It’s like time stops when you leave. You’ve been away five years, and when you come back, you feel that you should be picking up where you left off, not five years later. It’s hard to adjust to that side of things.”
Though Grant was away for less than six years, Ireland had undergone massive changes in her absence. “I had an idea of Ireland in my mind, and to me that’s the old Ireland,” she says. “When I left there was no euro. I came back to a multi-cultural Ireland, and even though I was accustomed to living like that in Australia, it was very strange to see that in Ireland.”
For Creedon, however, the changes were no surprise given the warnings he had received from friends about how different things would be on his return. “Flying into Dublin, driving around the city, I saw it really hadn’t changed,” he says. “I was expecting something phenomenal from all the talk about the Celtic Tiger. People were telling me, ‘Ireland’s booming! It’s a great place to be’, then I came back and saw people who thought it still acceptable to dress daily in tracksuits and sneakers.”
It’s not just those who have been away that have to adjust to returning, however. “I think the myth creation is a two-way process,” says Jackson. “Those that stay at home also have a mythos surrounding those who went away.” Creedon has experienced this first-hand. “Once you go away you become part of the community that has travelled away. You come home and the people that have lived here through everything keep you at a distance.”
For Keith Harwood, however, coming home to Ireland was a very different experience. Having grown up in Palmerstown, Dublin, he emigrated with his parents and two sisters for Bondi beach when he was just 10 years old, and was quick to assimilate.
“We lost our accents after about two and a half years,” he recalls. “We never forgot about Ireland, but we were Australian.” His parents weren’t as quick to let go of home, however. “The first time I went to a rugby match between Australia and Ireland and started singing Advance Australia Fair , my mother started elbowing me in the ribs, saying ‘Shut up! You’re not Australian!’”
Despite his Irish parentage, he felt few ties to his country of birth, and it was only when he stopped in Dublin as part of his world travels that he came to appreciate this aspect of his own identity. “I just started becoming Irish,” he recalls. “I felt Irish, I wanted to be Irish, I fell in love with the place and the people.”
Having made the decision to return permanently to Ireland, he has since been forced abroad again to seek work. However, he plans to incorporate his dual heritage by bringing an Australian fast-food franchise, Oporto, to Ireland.
Harwood hasn’t entirely relinquished the possibility of some day returning to Australia. “If I ever did did move back to Australia, I’d like to do what my parents did, and bring a small family there when I want life to slow down. Equally, I’d love to raise a family in Clontarf and bring my kids to the rugby and soccer.”
“My own feeling is that the current availability of relatively cheap and convenient travel means that the traditional paradigm for emigrants, returned or leaving, has shifted,” explains Jackson.
For many, the result is, as Grant puts it, a divided life. “While I’m here I have a pull to Australia, and when I’m there, I’ve a pull to Ireland.”
With so many moving and being informed by travel and new cultural experiences, will this, along with our own influx of immigrants, contribute to a change in our sense of being Irish?
“Take a central figure like St Patrick who is a quintessentially Irish icon,” says Jackson. “St Patrick was a migrant worker, and in a way the re-crafting of that particular life story is illustrative of the dynamic of identity formation.”
So what exactly is it we’ll all be celebrating on Tuesday with our green furry hats and diddly eye? McCarthy for one will be back in Ireland for the festivities, although she no longer sees it as coming home. Yet, far from leaving her adrift from any cultural identity, she’s not at all worried about tinteans for the time being, and has plans to move even further afield once her time in Brighton is up. ”I call everywhere home,” she laughs. Now that’s something we can all drink to.