Forgotten Irish: tell the real story

WRITING as one of Fergus Finlay’s “people without an education” who emigrated to the UK in the early ‘60s, I found his well-meaning but rather smug column on immigration (Irish Examiner, February 15) lacking in any real understanding of what life was like then, and still is, for many driven by economic circumstances to leave home to seek employment elsewhere.

He implies that not only were Irish emigrants of a certain era uneducated but somehow their currency as human beings was of less value than those “graduates” who joined the brain-drain to, for example, Silicone Valley.

And so, while it was sad to see them leave home, they were in fact no great loss to the country.

Irish emigrants can get over this kind of insult; after all we suffered much worse in the long years of our reluctant exile, but it really is time for proper respect and recognition to be paid to those men and women who lived, worked and survived the alienation of rejection by their native country.

Mr Finlay cites Boston and Coventry as two of the cities where Irish people settled and, according to him, it would seem they inevitably suffered either from loneliness, booze or detachment.

I can’t speak for Boston, but I do know something about Coventry, one of Cork’s twinned cities, and my home for more than 40 years.

Of course many Irish emigrants did not find the kind of life they had hoped for and the loss of the reassuring certainties of family, home and church took their toll. And yet for all that, the Irish in Coventry, as elsewhere, made their way, made their mark and, in many cases, made their name. Those of us who had a tenuous foot on the political ladder used to call Coventry our adopted city, and its enlightened polity almost made that true.

But the fact was, we were not adopted by Coventry or anywhere else: we were abandoned by our own country. The myth of the uneducated Irish is a good example of this. Some of the brightest and best Irish people I had the privilege of knowing in Coventry were not uneducated in the sense that they chose not to pursue the education available to them as youngsters.

For them, education past the age of 14 was simply not an option. Their circumstances and those of their families, and the utter disinterest of government and religious educational authorities, mitigated against them ever having any prospect of realising their full potential. It is to their enormous credit that so many of them overcame those obstacles and, ironically, as a result of the money they sent home, helped to support the country that regarded them as little more than an embarrassment.

When Mr Finlay tells us that immigration has given Ireland “palpable and visible benefits”, perhaps he should ask the immigrants themselves where, in an ideal world, would they rather be earning their living. The answer might surprise him.

Nick Nolan

(Former Lord Mayor of Coventry and leader of Coventry City Council)Ballinalacken

Ballylanders

Co Limerick