An Irishman's Diary

In the light of tragic events elsewhere, the untimely death of Christy Hennessy seems like a story from another era. The singer had long ago escaped the London building sites of his youth, or so it seemed. Cruelly, it now appears he did not make a clean getaway. There was a bill still to be paid, in the grim form of asbestosis.

Just last Friday, he posted a final message on his website wishing fans a happy Christmas and thanking those who had bought his records and attended concerts. I'm sad to say now I never did either.

His music was a little too sweet, too gentle for me, although I was always taken by the sheer mellifluence of his voice, made more so by the Kerry accent that always shone through in the songs. He also always came across in interviews as a kind, unassuming, generally likeable man. And it's reassuring now to hear those who knew him say that's exactly how he was.

He was funny too, even when being serious. The nearest his lyrics ever got to being edgy was probably on Don't Forget Your Shovel - a small comic masterpiece and a favourite in the Christy Moore repertoire. It pretends to be a nonsense song (although apparently the original lyric was "Don't Get Your Shovel", which might be more logical).

But as a portrait of the Irish navvy's former lot in Britain, it is just as biting as McAlpine's Fusiliers. In the space of three minutes, it covers everything from the lack of sanitation on building sites, to contractors' cynicism about health and safety, via the existentialist concerns of manual earth-movers everywhere: "We want to go to heaven but we're always digging holes."

It also touches on Britain's tense relationship with its nearest neighbours, at a time when we were its biggest import. Irish immigrants were needed for the heavy lifting, but were regarded with suspicion and hostility. Or as the song puts it: "Enoch Powell will give us a job diggin' away to Annascaul/ And when we're finished digging it he'll close the hole and all." The song's tone is jaunty and without bitterness throughout, even on the sad bit at the end: "There's six thousand five hundred and fifty nine Paddies over there in London all tryin' to dig their way back to Annascaul/ And very few of them boys is going to make it back at all./ I think that's terrible."

It was terrible, right enough. I met some of them myself back in the 1980s, when I was a tourist passing through that world. And although Enoch Powell had been exiled to the Mourne Mountains by then and most of the building sites had acquired toilets, the experience allows me to empathise a little with the song.

At the time, the Irish still provided most of the labourers who stood on Cricklewood Broadway at dawn every morning, waiting for kerb-crawling builders who needed muscle. An Irish accent still marked you as the enemy within the gates. And London was still full of Paddies who talked of going back to Annascaul - which, as far as they were concerned, might as well have been a million miles away.

No doubt there are some talking about it still. But changed economic circumstances have since resolved the issue for many, one way or another. In the Cricklewood Homeless Concern, the Christmas before last, I met a Galway man who had gone home in the late 1990s, but found that he and Ireland had grown too far apart to be reconciled. He had since returned to a London that, for better or worse, fitted him better.

By contrast, there was another sixty-something there - from Kerry - who was eagerly anticipating his repatriation with the help of the Safe Home charity. Both men were among the last vestiges of an era. The labourers plying for hire in Cricklewood now were from eastern Europe and beyond. There were no new Irish coming over. Or if they were, it was to buy London, rather than build it.

The world Christy Hennessy was born into is an even more distant memory. When there was nothing unusual about being one of a family of nine, as he was, and when you could leave school at eleven-and-a-half (the half was important to him, according to the website), as he did, before emigrating at 15.

He worked on the building sites by day but played the folk music clubs at night. Which is where he was discovered by the BBC's John Peel, who gave him his big break with a studio session in 1974. It was not until the 1990s that Hennessy broke into the mainstream, however, which makes his demise now seem all the more premature.

Still, Luka Bloom recorded a song with him recently and found him serene about his fate. He was "an angel among us", Bloom said - a point underlined by the fact that the record was in aid of Hennessy's favourite charity, Children in Crossfire, with which he was engaged right to the end. If there is a heaven, clearly, Christie need not have worried that he spent so much of his life digging in the wrong direction.