I WAS in the lovely city of Galway recently.
For a while I sat in a car park outside a Lidl and there was also, I think, a pizzeria and a hairdressers and a tanning salon.
A circle of different shops. It was early evening and early January and dark. It was Galway, so it was raining.
I grew up with a lot of west of Ireland people. Indeed, I think most of the people I grew up with were from that neck of the woods. Galway. Mayo. Roscommon.
There was a good scattering from most other counties too, Cork, Kerry, Dublin, Wexford, but it mainly seemed to be the west, over there in the English midlands.
Of course, Galway, like Cork or Wexford or Dublin, isn’t the place it was when those people left.
There were no discount German supermarkets or circle of shops or a building you went into to get a tan when they were getting on the boat.
Which is just change, simply the passing of time. I’m not saying this is either a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.
There are two true things, though, about those people, those immigrants, I grew up with. Two simply factual things.
Firstly, the Ireland those immigrants, those parents and grandparents, left was a truly distinct place.
Yes, countries and places still are distinct but they are also far more alike too.
The Cork city I knew as a young man in the 1980s, an economically depressed place, was far more uniquely a place than it is now. Now it has the shared features of many, many cities.
The same shops as elsewhere. Of course, it is still distinctly Cork city but in a different way. Ireland as a whole is like this too.
By contrast those west of Ireland immigrants I knew growing up came from an Ireland that was only just moving out of a centuries-old peasant way of life.
They came from an Ireland utterly in thrall to the Catholic Church. In thrall to such an extent that Ireland was the equivalent of a one-party state. Certainly along theological, social and behavioural norms, if not political. Although, it was a Fianna Fáil state too.
Ireland was a different place then. Not more Irish as the reactionaries would have you believe, as if Irishness were set in stone, but differently Irish.
This meant those Irish were distinctively different too. They stood out.
I remember so much and so often travelling on a bus through the streets of 1980s Birmingham and I could identify the Irish people I saw by sight alone.
They way they looked. They way they dressed. The way they moved. I knew them.
The way they talked, of course, was the big reveal but I didn’t need that. You didn’t need that. We knew them. We saw them and knew who they were.
I spent the afternoon the other day with my mother. She left Ireland at the age of eighteen and reared a family of six in another city in another country.
She stayed away for over forty years but in many ways, the most fundamental ways, she never left.
She came home at least once a year, was always coming home in her conversation, and finally did come home.
She is a widow now and she’s still coming home I think, in the ways she talks and the things she recalls.
The immigrant is always coming home but the sad truth is that even when they come back they don’t fully come home.
How could they? They can’t come home to the Lidl and the roundabout and the tanning shop.
There’s an Irish generation of my family now in England and they probably aren’t recognisable from the top of a bus.
Educated and confident and assured and Irish and good luck to them and thank God for them.
But I return again and again to that generation I grew up with and my honest and utter admiration of them only deepens as the years pass by.
How Irish they were. And how brave and how scared and how insistent and how much they achieved with so little.
And what almighty craic they were. And how much I still see them and how much I still miss them.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
See More: Emigration, Irish
