Smugglers, revolutionaries and hunger strikers: Inside Ireland's first refugee camp
Hungarian refugee children at Knockalisheen in Co Clare. Image from Sean Curtin's Limerick: A Stroll Down Memory Lane
Vera Sheridan was just five years old when she fled Hungary.
In 1956, revolution and chaos came to her country when a popular uprising against the communist government was comprehensively crushed by the Red Army of the Soviet Union.
“We were something of a marked family in my village,” says Vera. “My grandfather had some standing in the village and in 1946 people had asked him to become mayor. He was arrested immediately and he spent a year in internment. So if you came from that kind of background it was more likely you’d be picked up again.”
When the uprising broke out ten years later, the authorities came knocking.
“My grandmother had no idea where he was for two weeks. At that point, he had barely anything left, only a motorbike and they took away his licence, which just shows you how petty they were.”
Faced with the prospect of endless harassment and the possibility of deportation to Russia for the slightest transgressions, Vera’s mother and uncle decided to leave the country.
Vera followed soon after, smuggled out early one November morning by a man she had never met before.
“There were professional smugglers around and my mother met one when she was in Austria,” says Vera. “She paid him with the bit of jewellery she had. He came to the village with a token from my mother, something my grandparents would recognise came from her. My grandmother had a decision to make and she decided to let me go.”
That decision was the start of a life adventure that eventually took Vera to the suburbs of south Dublin where she now lives.
“I was reunited with my mother and we spent time in a couple of refugee camps near the Austrian border and then in Austria itself near Vienna. I didn't like that at all and I refused to eat apparently. From there we went to England where we stayed in a camp in Hednesford.”
Even though the boat she travelled in was seaworthy, Vera remembers how terrified she was crossing the channel as a young girl and seeing the sea for the first time.
But Britain was a refuge and eventually, a place where both she and her mother could build a life. Her mother married a man from Hungary that she met in the camp.
He soon found employment and was thus able to leave and set up a home in Nottingham, where Vera learned to speak English. The family eventually moved to Brighton where Vera grew up.
Though she has lived in Ireland since the mid-eighties her southern English accent remains quite strong. So how did she end up In Ireland?
“I was always a little adventurous,” says Vera. “Shortly after Zimbabwe got its independence, I went there to teach English. That’s where I met my husband, an Irishman from Clontarf and we came to Ireland in 1987. We have been here ever since.”
Vera continued her journey in academia and soon started working as a lecturer in Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University.
It was during her time there that she first came across the story of Knockalisheen Refugee Camp in Co. Clare, the subject of her recently published book, Suitable Strangers.
“I had a student who did a Ph.D. on Hungarians in Ireland,” says Vera. “Her focus was a little different in that it also dealt with those who arrived before and after 1956. I started to find snippets of information about Knockalisheen. I wanted to see if there was more to it and what the day-to-day life of the people who lived in the camp was like.”
Hungary’s revolution was over almost as quickly as it began but its aftermath was felt for years. Neighbouring countries such as Austria were flooded with refugees and were forced to ask for help.
In Ireland, the uprising was seen as a battle between good Christians and Godless Communists.
“There was a huge outpouring of sympathy in Ireland,” says Vera. “Ireland had just become a member of the United Nations and was trying to find a place on the international stage. Part of the reasoning behind offering places to Hungarian refugees was around that.”
£150,000 was raised and the government offered to house 1,000 refugees. A representative was dispatched to look for families that would, it was thought, assimilate better. In the end, just over 500 people took up the offer.
“And not all of them were families which caused a bit of a kerfuffle at the time,” says Vera. “This was a revolution so most revolutionaries were young men so there weren’t that many families. There were quite a few children. In fact, over half of the total were children but most of them were what were called ‘irregulars’, that is they arrived with people other than their parents and then there were some who were unaccompanied.”
Life at the camp could be tough. In one instance, two children were sentenced to two years at the infamous reformatory at Daingean for the stealing of blankets.
“Because of how they were perceived, the refugees were initially placed on something of a pedestal by the locals,” says Vera.
“That means you can fall off very quickly. In some cases that’s what happened but it was a mixed bag. They kept themselves busy and found odd jobs, maybe there was a woman who could crochet or someone who could work with wood and they would go into Limerick and sell their bits and pieces. That money was felt within the Limerick economy, to such an extent that when the government proposed moving them to another part of Ireland, there was a bit of an outcry. The Hungarians didn’t want to go either because they knew the place and they had made contacts there.”
Though some of the refugees thrived, two married locally and one signed to play football for Limerick FC, others were frustrated. Many were highly qualified and were eager to move to countries with economies that could accommodate their skills and pay them.
By the spring of 1957, the 371 refugees that remained at Knockalisheen staged a hunger strike to draw attention to what they called their “sit and rust” existence in the camp’s cold huts.
“The government had passed over care to the Irish Red Cross and they tried to stay aloof from the day-to-day running of Knockalisheen and problems there in general," says Vera.
“The Hungarians wanted to meet with a government official to obtain first-hand information about their situation. Post-strike, two officials did go down and met with the camp committee.” Gradually the visas began to arrive and with that, the numbers at the camp dwindled.
“Most of the families went to Canada,” says Vera. “Some went to the States, Australia, and Argentina and there were two Jewish families who went to Israel. Only a handful stayed on in Ireland.” In 1958, the camp was closed and though there were just a few families left in Ireland, finding permanent accommodation for them proved controversial.
“There was a proposal to house just four families in nearby Castleconnell and that wasn’t popular with locals,” says Vera. “Castleconnell itself had experienced emigration, poverty and there was a lack of jobs in the area. Eventually, one family did go to live there and there seemed to be no bother with that. I would see the aversion to the idea more as a sign of frustration but there was also a lack of communication from the government.”
Though it undoubtedly had its problems, Vera says that most of the camp’s residents remembered their time there positively.
“There was a nun named Sister Immaculata who worked with the refugees and, quite remarkably, taught herself Hungarian,” says Vera. “People kept in correspondence with her over the years, right up until the 1970s and you could see from their letters that they looked back on their time in Ireland fondly.”
- Suitable Strangers: The Hungarian Revolution, a Hunger Strike, and Ireland's First Refugee Camp by Vera Sheridan is out now.
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