Award-winning novelist PAUL BURKE reflects on his London-Irish background
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.
However, 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 an EU flag waver. Remembering the butter mountains, wine lakes and gravy trains, I’ve always viewed it as a bit of a racket. And as one who leans slightly to the left, I’ve been dismayed to see its member states now marching all too predictably to the right.
And whilst I’m in the confessional box, 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.
That said, I do have a legitimate claim to that passport because my dad was from Dublin and I was born one postcode from 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 helped change things. When the world’s most powerful man was pictured proudly proclaiming his Irish heritage, it was now becoming fashionable to have some sort of connection to “the old country”.
Before that, to put it mildly, it wasn’t.
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 “County Kilburn”, lying conveniently between the two termini, attracted more Irish settlers than anywhere else in Britain.
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, Camden was inner London so the pubs closed at 11.00 and this led to a nightly ritual. At around 10.32, people would head 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 like 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 & basil scent diffuser.
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.
See More: Irish In London, Irish Passport
