A return to a Safe Home

BEFORE there was an IMF, before there was a European Union, Irish people had to rely on her economic migrants to keep the home fires burning.

Forced to leave a country who could neither feed nor house her own, they sent back whatever money they could, a figure which would run to the billions today. But what exactly are the people back home doing for them as they approach their final days?

Set up in January 2000, the Safe Home programme is a national organisation that seeks to assist older Irish-born emigrants to return to the town in which they were born and raised. So far it has repatriated 1,237 people from all over the world and is currently processing a further 915 applications.

“These are wonderful, selfless individuals who supported the economy when nobody else would,” says Dr Jerry Cowley, chairman of the programme. He discovered the “forgotten Irish” when he built St Brendan’s Village in Co Mayo, a low-support, sheltered housing development which allowed elderly people to live in the bosom of their own community, instead of being forced into a rest home in Castlebar or Westport.

“Families started contacting me and telling me about their relatives who had emigrated 40 or 50 years before, who were in bad health and who were living a terribly lonely existence in bedsits all over the world.”

Time and circumstance had got the better of them and many of them had never married, having clutched so tightly to the dream that they would one day return home.

“They had all sent letters to their local county councils but the general response was: ‘we have enough people in Ireland, we can’t possibly look after those in other countries as well’,” Dr Cowley says.

What was needed was a body to act as an intermediary with the local housing authorities. To give advice to anybody considering a return to the country. Dr Cowley toured the length and breadth of Ireland, speaking to community groups involved in voluntary housing and making sure that a special amendment be added to the capital assistance scheme to guarantee 25% of any new development put aside for those who satisfied the Safe Home criteria.

Once you come home, there is no going back. “Since choosing the wrong applicant would mean depriving another person of the chance to return,” says Dr Cowley, “we have a strict induction process to insure that it is the right decision for whomever applies.”

Once an applicant is deemed to meet the criteria they are added to a waiting list. “Housing associations tell us what they have available and we put it in our newsletter. We try and get them a spot as near to the place they came from as possible, but sometimes it can be as much as 20 miles away.”

The person then has to decide whether they want to take it, or wait for one closer to home.

People returning have to burn their bridges and let everything go. “You have to give up your home and all that goes with it. If you are not prepared to face that, then you are not prepared for the move.”

Jerry and his wife make home visits to assess what support network people have in their current location in comparison to what they would have in Ireland and make sure that the applicants are aware that the transport and health services in rural Ireland may not be up to the standard they are used to in the big cities. “What people find most difficult is the silence.”

Moving can also be quite a trauma at that age. “So in the first year we just make ourselves available, check if they need anything and help them deal with any unforeseen circumstances.”

“They did everything for me,” says Ellen ‘Nellie’ Gotzner, who returned to Cork city from Germany in 2006.

“Before I came they sent me such lovely, consoling letters and when I got here they put my mind at ease. They set me up with a PPS number and a bank account and they took me from one office to another so I could get my pension transferred. I had very little schooling so there was no way I could write the letters that they wrote for me.”

They also have to make sure that applicants are in tune with the reality of modern Ireland.

Bridie O’Connor returned to Clonberne, Co Galway, from Birmingham in 2002. “When I went to England in 1960 I thought they were all gone mad,” she says. ” But I thought the Irish were twice as mad when I came back here.

“When I left, everyone was neighbourly, friendly, and, while I had seen lots of the changes from my frequent visits home, I was amazed, and am still amazed, at the vulgarity of the young people.”

At least half of the people who contact Safe Home decide it’s not for them. “Its just impractical in the grand scheme of things. They can’t give up the weekly visits from their grandchildren, their weekly game of bridge or the flat they have spent so long doing up,” Dr Cowley says.

But then there are those who just want to come home to die. “These people are not getting any younger,” concludes Dr Cowley. “Now is the time to help them and that’s what we are trying to do.”