• Photos from The London Irish Centre >

The Ireland Funds visited The London Irish Centre in North London— which houses some of the organisations and support groups targeted by The Forgotten Irish Campaign—and invited Polly Devlin to tell readers more about The Forgotten Irish.

Ireland is a country which, perhaps more than any other, is the result of its history and the subject of dream, myth and most of all memory, especially for those vast numbers of Irish men and women who had to leave it behind in order to find work in other countries.

Until recently, besides everything else, Ireland was famous for being a country of emigrants. One of the traditional images was of the fluttering handkerchiefs of people waving from the shore, the answering exiles on the ship’s rails, the never-to-return quality of the leaving.

Emigration was the curse of Ireland
Emigration means the action of departing of a particular place or set of surrendership, or the native country to settle permanently in another. It is the word “permanent” that bears the pain—for pain there is in emigration and always was and will be—nobody who has not emigrated can know what it is to emigrate, to have to leave for whatever the reasons, the cruelty of circumstances. It undermined the vitality of social life, broke up the social structure, eroded family ties; rural life was fragmented and communities weakened. And for centuries once you emigrated you emigrated for ever.

And it was the knowledge that you were leaving forever that made the leaving so sharp. The old men and women that The Ireland Funds help come of this generation. When they left Ireland there was no returning.

We can only give thanks that it is over; but it has left behind many a bitter legacy; most poignant of all the legacy of those men and women living old, alone and lonely in a country in which they worked so hard for so many years and which does not recognise their plight, or indeed their contribution.

The Ireland Fund of Great Britain has begun a determined and inspired campaign to help these individuals so that they may be able to end their days in companionship and peace and with a feeling of comparative security.

Nowadays it is easy to return to Ireland in physical terms but difficult if you have been away a long time and are elderly. It is difficult psychologically and financially speaking. Ireland has become a rich country and where people used to go back and slip into the old way of life, now they go back to a modern country where housing is at a premium and where life is fast paced. So many of the hard working Irish who for years kept the infrastructure of England going have been here so long that they have lost the family to which they once belonged. They have literally nowhere to go; and yet emotionally their roots are deep in Ireland. There can be little loneliness as intense as those of many of the isolated Irish in big cities in England and the USA—the Forgotten Irish—those people who worked all their lives and then at the end found they had no financial support, no pensions, nowhere to go and no-one to speak to. This has happened to so many Irish who left with heavy hearts, worked all hours and sent their hard earned money home to support Ireland when it was on its knees.

Ireland lies at the heart of their imagination enshrined in Irish songs, ballads, stories and poems, but it is a language that only another Irish person could speak. This is where The Ireland Fund of Great Britain is helping enormously: by raising funds for numerous charitable voluntary organizations who have specialist knowledge and experience in helping and supporting the Forgotten Irish, so that they have a place to go to where they can find a life of their own, find people who share experiences with them, who know them.

When I was fifteen I went to the Gaeltacht to learn Irish and entered into a territory of the mind. Of course it was palpable—it was Donegal—but it was also a territory of the mind, the country perhaps that emigrants cherish for ever. I wish I remembered more of the language but I recall there were two words for the English verb to know; fios, meaning common immediate knowledge—on the wing as it were, happening now, and eolas meaning knowledge that was marshalled, rational, organized, defined. When the Irish go to the clubs and meeting places which The Ireland Fund of Great Britain supports, they find there both kinds of knowledge and are cheered.

Through its entire vicissitudes, no nation has kept such a fierce hold on its identity as Ireland. Arthur Young, the traveler and historian who made a tour of Ireland in 1776-78, wrote that the people “seemed not only tied to the country but almost to the parish in which their ancestors had lived” and if you go to, say The London Irish Centre, that haven of hope and comfort in Camden Square in North London, you will find that the first question that will be asked of newcomers is “what part of Ireland do you come from?” even if you have lived here for forty years. Young also wrote “It was a characteristic much noted by officials and previous settlers of wherever the Irish fled to that they above all other nations clung to the memories of their lost land.”

Ireland has always had this effect on her people. When I’m talking to an Italian say or a Parisian, who has left home and lived in England I never get this sense of their native country’s existence in their mind. They speak of the sensual and aesthetic pleasures of their country, whereas the scattered Irish all seem to passionately cling to an idea of the country they had to leave behind and somehow could never get back to. In his remarkable book Emigrants and Exiles, Kerby A. Miller sums a good deal up most succinctly when he says “it may be that we all—men and women in modern societies—are in some sense exiles from the better, happier lands of our dreams and that Ireland’s past emigrants and present inhabitants only more starkly or poignantly reflect a universal dichotomy between aspiration and achievement.”

I was brought up on songs which only conveyed loss. The songs I listened to made us know how emigrants felt, as though a living part had been wrenched away, Ireland shivered at their extremities. I grew up in the tail end of that dispensation of emigration as a way of life. All around us in our little parish there were houses where all the brothers and sisters, ten of a family, had emigrated and there was no question of them returning. They had gone for ever.

Forever hurtling towards a new world, a kind of star trek that would never end. For many it did end in loneliness and poverty in a down at heel hostel.

Years ago I talked to an old woman of 90, who had emigrated. She had suffered as thousands of her compatriots suffered. “They thought it was all great at home and we put a good face on it: but we were sold into slavery. Nobody knows what went into making the money we scraped up to send home. You couldn’t say, well you wouldn’t say that you worked from morning to night like skivvys. We weren’t let out: we had nowhere to go. The man or woman you worked for owned you. Nobody knows what it was like to leave a country place with only a horse and cart on the road and to step out onto a busy street. You didn’t know where to turn.”

Patrick Donovan, a fine Irish journalist once wrote

“The beginning of emigration was one of the horrors of history. No-one could take pleasure in its continuation. But at least the pain has gone out of it.”

I would disagree about the pain. Pain can become so layered onto a life that suffering becomes a habit. To experience a thing is not to know it or even to have the power to remember it coherently. Our knowledge and memories of emigration are predicated on pain. It would be a healing thing if the pain could fade into memory; and if for once in Irish history, the memory could fade. That is why what The Ireland Fund of Great Britain is doing is so ratifying and so heartening. They are helping the Forgotten Irish to be remembered; they are helping them to be able to remember without regret and pain; they are helping them to live once again in a happier time; the present. They are helping them not to have to dread the future.

And this present of day-to-day living is made by giving them somewhere congenial to go to, by volunteers coming to visit them, by having people help to look after those practical matters of bills, utilities and health issues, which can be so defeating when you are old and helpless and tired. In short it helps by making the Forgotten Irish feel at ease in a country where for so long they tirelessly worked without having found a permanent place they could call home. It is wonderful work but this gift of peace of mind, though priceless, paradoxically costs money. We all owe these people so much. We all have to contribute. The Ireland Fund of Great Britain depends on us as the Forgotten Irish depend on them. We won’t let them down; by the end of the campaign they will be the Remembered Irish and the honoured. — Polly Devlin

Polly Devlin writer, broadcaster, film-maker, art critic and conservationist, was born in a remote part of Co. Tyrone in the 1940s where there were few telephones and no electricity, and ponies and traps were more common than cars. Her perspective on contemporary life was informed by this atavistic childhood. At 21, she moved to London and worked as features editor at Vogue and wrote for the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. Soon after, she moved to Manhattan to work with Diana Vreeland on American Vogue. She married and returned to England where she studied film and directed the documentary The Daisy Chain. In the 80s she wrote for The International Herald Tribune and published her first novel, All of Us There, re-published by Virago in 2004. Her latest book, A Year in the Life of an English Meadow, describes her conservation projects at her Somerset home where she lives when not in London, France or New York, where she is a professor at Barnard College Columbia University.