I SOMETIMES find it bizarre that even when I’m talking to my own kids about my Irish upbringing they look a bit bewildered. I find myself saying “I’m not making this up.”
With them all born and brought up in Ireland I’d assumed they’d get it, understand it easily, but they don’t. Not really.
It is a little like my cousins here in Ireland when I was growing up.
Explaining our Irishness to them often seemed to halt at our accents. Growing up in an Irish family in England is a very specific thing and one that the Irish in Ireland seem most likely to misunderstand.
One of the hardest points to make clear is that describing your Irish upbringing in England is just that.
It is a descriptive thing. It is not an aspirational thing. That is why the whole ‘Plastic Paddy’ jibe just never made any sense. This isn’t about wanting to be Irish. This is just about being Irish.
Indeed being Irish more intensely by virtue of it being a defining feature of your life. Not only that but the idea of ‘wanting’ to be Irish just didn’t really make any sense. Being Irish wasn’t cool or hip in 1980s Britain. It was, in fact, the very opposite.
So who, especially amongst those young and impressionable, would want to be Irish? Being Irish wasn’t the aim. Being Irish just was.
And this wasn’t some singular experience. This wasn’t like someone who grew up somewhere different from where their parents were from and has a very individual story.
This a story about emigration and immigration and when you are in an immigrant family it tends not to be just your family. There tend to be quite a few of you.
Your parents didn’t set out on some lifestyle adventure. They went looking for work and a new life and a lot of their contemporaries went with them.
The English city I grew up in was a very Irish one.
By sheer number alone it was an Irish one. There were a lot of us. The roll call at school a litany of Irish names fresh from inner city English streets. O’Donnell, Daly, Mahoney, Doherty, Condon, O’Sullivan, Heffernan.
All the Irish in England and all their children. When I say to my children that I didn’t really associate with English people until I went to university when I was twenty it’s not, of course, strictly true.
I grew up in a big city so I was surrounded by English people. There were even some on our street.
But my schools were overwhelmingly Irish, our social life was Irish, my parents’ friends were Irish, even the local football team I adored was supported by a lot of the other local Irish kids simply because that is where we lived. England was out there, for sure, but it was mainly somewhere else.
Our living room, which I only saw with other eyes when some of those English university friends came to visit, either had Holy pictures or symbols of Ireland on the walls.
Nobody from an Irish family would have remarked upon this but those English eyes went wide. As I said to my English girlfriend, now my wife, when she first came to visit my family, I guarantee you will never have seen anything like this before.
You will never have seen that we drink in pubs our parents drink in, that someone will be saying here, girl, have a drink as soon as they’ve met you, that you’ll be fed and then fed some more, that someone will sing, someone will tell you you don’t look English but if you are, sure, that’s grand, that there will be very little formality but quite a bit of hugging and there’ll be a lot of swearing and very little of it in anger.
Born and reared in England and being Irish isn’t contradictory. It isn’t strangely aspirational. It is simply descriptive. It is simply actual. It is truthful. It is factual.
Those denigrated as Plastic Paddies don’t want to be Irish. They just are Irish. Birmingham Irish, for instance, is a thing and makes perfect social, historical, and cultural sense.
Indeed, denying it is the thing that would be false, would nonsensical.
To assert that thousands and thousands of Irish born people set up home in England and created social clubs, GAA clubs, communities, pubs and churches, and that this did not translate into England-born people with an Irish identity would be bizarre.
It’s obvious isn’t it? I’m not making this up.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Irish In England, Joe Horgan
