London City Luncheon : 4 March 2008

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Some 300 business leaders from London and Dublin returned to the magnificent and historic surroundings of The Banqueting House in Whitehall Palace for the 2008 London City Luncheon.  The event was once again co-chaired by John Rowan and Peter Kiernan, both of whom are trustees and leaders of The IFGB’s Forgotten Irish Campaign.

The keynote speaker, Sean FitzPatrick (Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank and Smurfit Kappa Plc., non-executive director of Aer Lingus Group plc, Greencore plc and Experian Group Ltd.), ensured that The Forgotten Irish remained the centre of attention by focusing his speech on his recollections of student summers in the 1960s spent working as a casual labourer on building sites, living and socialising amongst the Irish of North London – some of whom would become The Forgotten Irish.  “It is our moral duty to remember them and ensure that they are forgotten no longer” he said. “We owe it to them. We owe them an enormous debt, not of charity but of justice.  And I’m glad that through The Ireland Fund of Great Britain’s Forgotten Irish campaign we have started repaying it”

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Photos
1. Sean FitzPatrick
2. The Banqueting House
3. John Sharman
4. Brendan Mullin
5. Mary Flynn and Declan Quilligan
6. Aileen Ross, Sean FitzPatrick and Peter Sutherland
7. Ian Sutherland
8. Barry Keogh & David Smith
9. Luke Comer & Neil Young
10. Craig Best & David Murray
11. John Mernagh, Jonathan Davie & Conor O'Kelly
12. Janet Street-Porter
13. Joe Moynihan, Tom Gallagher and Jay Murray
14. Paddy Shanahan and Basil Geoghegan

Keynote Speech

Sean Fitzpatrick: Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Plc

‘Good afternoon everyone and thank you for inviting me to speak to you here today.  It’s a great privilege to be given the opportunity to remember, honour and mark the role and contribution of the Forgotten Irish. 

When I look at the city of London and I see the number of landmark office properties, and the five great hotels, which are now Irish-owned I feel a very real tingling of pride.  The point is that some of these buildings were built by the Forgotten Irish; these buildings are indeed symbolic of the past, the present and the future.

And this story is being replicated and retold in cities throughout the world. The Irish are everywhere and have become real players on the global markets.  We have many examples including Denis O’Brien, Derek Quinlan, Michael Smurfit, Mary Robinson, Gary Hynes, Maeve Binchy, Anne Enright, U2 etc – their numbers and achievements are legend.

Yes, we’ve certainly come a long way. And when we’ve travelled the distance that we have, it is always good to remember where you came from in first place. And that brings me to the central theme of today’s event, the Forgotten Irish charity.

The contrast between the success stories I have just been outlining is about as great as you could get with the room in the boarding house in Harlesden that I shared with eight big Irish labourers back in the mid 60s.  I am a product of the 60s and today I would to like explain what my experience with this group of men meant to me personally. I see a look of surprise on some of your faces. But I wasn’t always a banker and I wasn’t born into that line of work either.

I finished school in Ireland in the late sixties I went over to England to work whilst figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I think I probably learned more about real life in that summer than I had in my previous 18 years on the planet – or indeed in the following 18 years. What I learned then has stayed with me ever since. I can still see the ruddy, weather-beaten faces of those Irishmen who worked on the roads and building sites of London.  And I can still see the sad, wistful look in their eyes when talk would turn to Ireland.

Perhaps the saddest thing was the fact that a sizeable number of these people never integrated with the communities around them.  They never really settled.  And why not?  Because they were always going home.  They were never in England to stay permanently, just to work for a few years before returning to the old sod.

They were, to all intents and purposes, economic refugees.  They left behind them a country that was too poor to give them jobs and a future but they loved it nonetheless.

They left the country with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and their Irishness, and they clung to their Irishness like a life raft when they arrived in England.  They may have been poor and uneducated but they were Irish, and they were damn proud of it.

And they were bloody hard workers as well.  They provided the income by their remittances to allow us at home to grow and develop, they provided a safety value for the nation that did not provide for them the necessary education and social care.  They gave me a real sense of being Irish, an Irish identity, a love of being Irish, a love of the culture, the songs and the tradition.

They would get up early every morning and head out to the sites or the street corners were the hiring was done.  If you didn’t have a site to go to you had to get to where the gangers would be hiring men, and you had to get there early otherwise the ganger would be gone and the jobs with him. They would then work in harsh and often dangerous conditions for the day before coming home late in the evening for their dinner.

Weekends were extraordinary.  During the week the guys would go out for pints in local pubs in their working clothes – but the weekends were different.  Weekends were a time for dressing up.  Dance Halls, such as the Galtymore in Cricklewood, the 32 Club in Harlsden, the Gresham Ballroom in Holloway Road, these were the magnets for the Irish community on weekend nights.

I can still remember it as if it were only yesterday; the guys stripping down to their vests and giving themselves a good scrubbing before going out.  But they only washed their hands, arms, necks and faces – only the skin that wasn’t covered by their suits and shirts.

And then it was lashings of Brylcream in the hair and off out for a wild night trampling on the toes of Irish colleens and lashing back gallons of dodgy English Guinness.  They found a refuge for their dreams. Certain things live with you forever and one of them is smells.  And I’ll never forget the smells of that room in the boarding house in Harlesden.  It wasn’t the small of dirt or poor hygiene that was so overwhelming, it was the smell of poverty and despair and the lack of hope.

But when we look back from a distance of 40 years it is easy to see these people as some kind of amorphous mass or grouping and not as real, individual people at all.  But they were all individuals with their own families and stories.  And that’s the great thing about campaigns like this one, it reminds us of that fact.

People left Ireland because of absolute economic necessity and in many cases because of a sense of duty and self-sacrifice. Almost invariably they were the sons and daughters of large families whose parents found it difficult to make ends meet.  They left farms or homes in the cities so that their sisters and brothers could have a better chance in life. They also left because their families needed the money from an extra earner, there was no real work in Ireland.  So they went abroad and sent money home.

And many of them came home at Christmas, in their good suits and the only decent pair of shoes they had with presents for their families and their pockets bulging with money that was often borrowed.  They made up tales of the good life in England and talked of how they’d come home tomorrow if only that the life in England wasn’t so good.  But as soon as they retired they’d be home in a flash.

And then it was back on the mail boat to Holyhead and mail trains across Wales and England – changing at Crewe every time – and back to the boarding houses in Harlesden, Cricklewood, Kilburn and Willesden.

Flying was out of the question.  You might as well have suggested that they get a rocket to the moon as a flight to London.  Flying was purely for the rich.  Ordinary people took the boat or didn’t travel at all. When we look at the Ireland and Britain of today it is very hard to believe that the people I just spoke of ever existed.  Indeed it is hard to believe that the Ireland I spoke of ever existed.

Ireland is now a wealthy country by any standard.  Average income per capita is right up at the top of the EU and OECD league tables; unemployment is down below 5%; and almost half a million people have actually EMIGRATED TO Ireland over the past ten years in search of jobs and a better life.

Today’s Irish emigrants don’t leave the country because they are poor, the modern Irish economic migrant moves in search of new business opportunities. And far from Ireland needing its emigrants to send money home, we are busy exporting the stuff by the juggernaut as we seek investment opportunities beyond our own shores.

And this brings me neatly back to the point I started with.  Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Irish people have invested billions of Euro in overseas property over the past decade. Don’t think that I’m in some way gloating about Irish people owning these places now.  Not for one moment.

No, Irish people have bought these properties because they are a good investment – nothing more and nothing less.  And that cold-eyed business logic being demonstrated by the latest wave of Irish businesspeople makes me even more proud of my Irishness.

But this is not to say that there is no room for any sentiment whatsoever.  The fact that we are here today proves this is not the case.  It proves that we do stop and spare a thought for those who were left behind; those who never had the opportunity to share in this success or in our newfound wealth; those who have largely been forgotten.

And who are the forgotten Irish.  These are the people who through no fault of their own missed out on the rising tide of prosperity and the Celtic Tiger economy.  But we’ve also got to ask ourselves why they were forgotten for so long.

Had they simply disappeared? Had they all gone home?  Had most of them finally integrated into the society which gave them homes so many years ago?  Of course, in some instances they had, but in a lot of cases the answer to all of these questions was no.

I have my own theory about why they were forgotten.  They were forgotten because of the stories I told you earlier.  They were forgotten because many of us in Ireland were somehow less than comfortable sharing a nationality with them.  They were our version of Bertha Rochester; the mad relative locked in the attic who no one mentioned.

In short, they were forgotten largely because we chose not to remember them.

But they are forgotten no more because you and many other people like you have the courage and the pride to remember them.  And why did we choose not to remember them?  Because they don’t quite fit with our modern self image.  These are the people who were buck-leppin’ in ceilis in Cricklewood and bare knuckle fighting later.  They are not the young sophisticates many of us wanted to be identified with on our road to riches.

This is not a theory I am very comfortable with because it applies equally to me as it does to many other people who grew up in Ireland back then.  And I have less excuse for not remembering than most other people.

But I am pleased to say that the Forgotten Irish campaign is remembering them properly.  It does not seek to remember them with some sort of pity or a misplaced sense of noblesse oblige.  Instead it is looking to remember and commemorate them with sadness yes but with pride as well.

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And we should be proud of these people.  We should be proud of them for their simple act of self-sacrifice in going, for being themselves, noble people with the riches of culture, tradition and belief.

Say these people had stayed at home.  The State not only would have had to look after hundreds of thousands more on the dole queues but also would have been at the loss of the billions of pounds in today’s money of overseas remittances which came back in the post from these people to their families.

We never would have seen Lemass’s rising tide and Ireland would more than likely have remained an inward, protectionist largely agrarian society. I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that Ireland could well have become the equivalent of a West European Albania if not for the safety valve of emigration.

Many people lay claim to the genesis of the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s new found prosperity.  But no one mentions those hundreds of thousands of people who left the country so that those they left behind could have better lives.  They deserve some credit too.  And they deserve our gratitude.

It is not only our moral duty to remember them and ensure that they are forgotten no longer, but we owe it to them as well.  We owe them an enormous debt, not of charity but of justice and I’m glad that through the Forgotten Irish campaign we have started repaying it.

Now, I’d like to turn briefly to the Irish economy and the recent turmoil in the financial markets. 

The big question that most people are asking at home at present is what will be the impact of the credit crunch on the Irish economy.  The first thing they have pointed to is the quite dramatic downturn in the housing market both in terms of output and valuations. But this had already started in any case.  The cycle had to turn at some point.  House prices had probably reached the limits of affordability and output of 80,000 units a year was simply unsustainable. 

Remember we haven’t seen a price crash or anything like it.  Average prices are now about where they were in the middle of 2006; this is not a collapse, and we are not seeing a negative equity problem.  The fact is that we haven’t had the combination of a house price fall and rapid interest rate rises that is necessary to create the conditions for a full-blown housing market crisis like the one seen in Britain in the late eighties and early nineties.

Indeed, all the signs are now that the ECB will actually cut rates this year thus easing the lot of any borrowers who may be overstretched and giving some stimulus to the housing market.

Looking at the Irish economy as a whole I am even more confident.  When we look back at the 1980s when Ireland was an economic basket case the slightest ripple in the world economy was felt as a tidal wave on our little island.

Today, however, things are very different.  As I pointed out earlier, Ireland today is a very wealthy country.  And that wealth isn’t simply going to vanish overnight.  So, I’m still betting on Ireland to continue to prosper in the years ahead.  And when I look around this hall at the many successful Irish people here today I have even more cause for this confidence. 

However, today let’s remember that the Irish Nation in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s was underpinned by the Forgotten Irish / underpinned economically, culturally, and spiritually.  I for one would not be the person that I am today without the experience of being part of their lives, work and dreams. 

Today we honour them, let their light shine, we should look to remember and support them in a new and positive way, for what they have achieved, for who they are - a central part of our past and indeed our future.
Thank you

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