Straddling two cultures — an Irish childhood lived in the shadow of English floodlights and Irish memories
IT WAS in this fallow part of the year when we’d start looking forward to St. Patrick’s Day. People can knock it all they like but the day was sacrosanct to us. It was an essential day in our calendar.
A day when we really asserted who we were. The Holy Day of Obliteration.
My brother would invariably say, don’t start too early, wait for me to finish work. The first time I ever brought my English girlfriend, now wife, to meet my family was to a St. Patrick’s Day in Birmingham. She was from a very English, very upper middle class background. I remember distinctly saying to her, as we made our way to the backstreet pub next to the football ground, you will never have experienced anything like this. She’d never been in the same room as so many Irish people in her life.
St. Patrick’s Day was just the one day, days I’ll never forget and days too blurred to ever remember, but the essence of our Irish lives went way beyond that. In every corner of our lives in England lay Irishness. Now I, even after all these years, carry the accent of the city I grew up in.
I support, in a way that only someone growing up in the actual shadow of the floodlights can, an English football team. I married an English woman. I spent my formative, bewildered, misspent youth in numerous English cities.
I’ve worked, studied, and lived in numerous English cities. Birmingham, Preston, Coventry, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, London. I’d know my way, still, around the streets of a few of those places though I haven’t lived in England for over twenty-six years. I was born there. I grew up there. I sound like there. I know England and I carry a lot of English people and things very close to my heart.
My children were all born in Ireland, grew up here, were educated through the Irish language and are Irish in a way I never have been. But I still tell them I’m more Irish than them. And I’m only half-joking.
If I had been born in England of Irish parents, surrounded by English people and English life, then what my siblings and I experienced would have been singular to our family. I would merely be able to recount the tale of growing up in a country that my parents weren’t from.
Interesting, maybe, but only of personal relevance. That very much wasn’t the case. I was surrounded by Irish culture.
I was brought up in Irishness. An insistent Irishness that faced every day the fact that it wasn’t in Ireland. An immigrant Irishness.
The immigrant, you see, faces every day that their life exists in two places at once. The country they’re in and the country they’ve left.
Essential too is the fact that the immigrant is not some kind of expat choosing a lifestyle on some warm coast. The immigrant has come in at the bottom rung, looking for work, looking for a life, looking for the chance to have a chance, looking for the possibility of raising a family.
I grew up in an Irishness that was intrinsically Irish. Irish in all the ways that mattered. By contrast, is it not true, that people born in Ireland in the last few decades are having a life just as defined by global values and trends and events as they are Irish ones. The Irishness I grew up in, albeit it in England, was intensely and solely Irish. Even the showband music, inspired by Americana, was definitively Irish. We had both the emphasis of being Irish because were outside of Ireland and the fact that the Irishness we came from was an Irishness little changed in over half a century.
An Irishness that still had its roots, as our grandparent’s lives will testify, in the 1800s. An Irishness rooted only and specifically in Ireland.
My children were born here, reared here, speak Irish, have the accent, and are very proud of being Irish. I was born in England, reared there, have a Birmingham accent, know very few words of Irish. And, yet, I still tell them I’m more Irish than they are. I believe it. And, you know, I think sometimes they do too.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Birmingham, Diaspora, St Patrick's Day
