I’m now officially Irish – the proud recipient of a shiny red passport. It arrived, with the luck of the Irish, in time for St Patrick’s Day. But as I gaze fondly at the words ‘European Union’ and ‘Ireland’ embossed in gold on the front, I do feel the awkward guilt of the hypocrite. I may have voted Remain just to avoid any upheaval but I’ve never been much of a fan of the EU.
And while I’m in the confessional box, I should perhaps mention that I’m not even properly Irish – my mum was English. I’ve seldom visited the green fields of Erin and have never finished a whole pint of Guinness. So I’m afraid Paddies don’t come more plastic than me.
But I do have a legitimate claim to that passport because my dad was from Dublin – and I grew up in the London enclave of ‘County Kilburn’ which, at the time, had the biggest Irish population in Britain.
St Patrick’s Day serves as an annual reminder of that. In the UK, it used to pass unnoticed. Irish culture was yet to go global because Ronald Reagan’s presidency was yet to go wrong. When it did, his aides advised him to court the Irish vote the way JFK had done. Reagan reluctantly agreed, went to Ireland and was famously photographed having a pint of Guinness in the Tipperary village where his great-grandfather was born.
That photo changed everything. When the world’s most powerful man was pictured proudly proclaiming his Irish heritage, it suddenly became fashionable to have some sort of connection to ‘the old country’.
Before that, to put it mildly, Ireland was cruelly viewed as poor, backward and bogged down in bigotry. During the Troubles, Irish people in London were often assumed to be IRA sympathisers and subjected to baseless hostility. Trust me, Harrow Road police station was not a nice place to produce your driving licence if, like me, you had an Irish surname.
For migrants like my dad who’d bequeathed Irish surnames to English children, there were two routes from the Emerald Isle to this Scepter’d one: either Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, or Rosslare to Fishguard. The Holyhead train came into Euston, the Fishguard train into Paddington. So Kilburn, lying conveniently between the two termini, attracted more Irish settlers than anywhere else in Britain.
In London’s Irish enclaves, St Patrick’s Day was huge. At primary school, we wore sprigs of shamrock and watched Riverdance jigs performed in assembly by clumsy, ginger-haired children whose future would not be on the West End stage.
In Irish pubs, ‘Paddy’s Night’ rivalled Christmas Eve as the busiest night of the year. I could wax lyrical – to tin whistle accompaniment – about places like Biddy Mulligan’s and The Cock. But in truth, most Kilburn pubs were grim, forbidding places favoured by fighty Irish labourers and sinister representatives of the ‘RA’. Just before closing time, everyone stood for the Irish national anthem and then the hat would be passed round. The man holding it would fix you with a baleful stare: ‘Money for the cause, lads, money for the cause.’ A very middle-class girl whom I once took to Biddy’s thought he wanted ‘Money for The Corrs’.
In London’s Irish enclaves, St Patrick’s Day was huge. At primary school, we watched Riverdance jigs performed by clumsy children whose future would not be on the West End stage
Kilburn High Road was – still is – the border between the London boroughs of Camden and Brent. Back in the 1980s, Brent was considered outer London so the pubs closed at 10.30 p.m.; Camden was inner London so the pubs closed at 11 p.m., and this led to a nightly ritual. At around 10.32, dozens of Irishmen would stagger across from Biddy’s on the Brent side to the Coopers Arms on the Camden side to get a couple more pints in.
Irish dancehalls such as the Galtymore in Cricklewood and the National Ballroom in Kilburn were always reeling and rocking, largely because they all had late licences. Kev Malone’s dad, hard enough to skate on, ran the door at the Galty. It meant nothing at the time but this fearsome bouncer’s name was Joe Malone, which now makes him sound more like a lime and basil scent diffuser. The craic, as we used to say, was 90.
All so different now. Young people no longer need to journey across the Irish Sea to find work. The suffocating choke of the Catholic Church in their homeland has long been loosened and led transformational prosperity. Ah, sure, that’s grand – as my passport now permits me to say – but what isn’t so grand is the way certain Dublin 4 denizens – smooth, successful and keen to be seen as ‘European’ – aren’t quite so keen to acknowledge their debt to the ‘Old Irish’.
There’s now little mention of those brave, pioneering migrants who came to England and did menial work for meagre reward. The people who kept Ireland afloat by sending so much of their money home. Their loyalty to their country, through hard and hostile times, seems to have been quickly and shamefully forgotten. Digging the roads in threadbare suits, they’re an uncomfortable reminder of Ireland’s immiserated, religious and recent past. It concerns me that, as they all die off, they risk being airbrushed out of history.
Obviously, my new passport will be a blessing. The older I get, the less willing I am to waste my life being punished by the EU and made to stand in lengthy airport queues. However, my principal reason for getting it was to honour my dad and others like him. That Irish passport is a poignant reminder of the hard life they endured in England; a life they didn’t want for their children.
Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
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