A man named Dev stands in the atrium of the GPO, soaking up the history. “I gather,” he says, “that something quite important happened in this post office”.
Dev Griffin is a chatty, charming British radio host and the latest celebrity to delve into their family history in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One, Thursday, 9pm). He will be unfamiliar to many Irish people, but you can see why he’s successful. Griffin is upbeat and sincere and even created a stir on Strictly Come Dancing a few years back.
Now, he’s a presenter on Heart FM, which sounds like a squishier version of the squishiest parts of Today FM. Griffin is also half-Irish, half-Jamaican – and knows little about either side of his family. So he’s on a genuine journey of discovery in an enjoyably breezy penultimate episode in the latest season of Who Do You Think You Are?
On his mother Maggie’s side, the family’s Irish identity is largely forgotten. When his grandparents moved to London in the 1950s, they suppressed their Irishness to avoid discrimination.
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“You know the saying, No blacks, no dogs, no Irish,” says his mother. “We had to have elocution lessons to get rid of the Irish accents. We lost quite a bit. Racism was rife.”
He’s off to Dublin to learn more about his mother’s side. He discovers his great-granduncle, Patrick Weafer, fought in the 1916 Rising, participating in a rooftop shoot-out on Parliament Street, where the volunteers were trying to take City Hall.
Meanwhile, his great-grandfather, Frank Weafer, worked as an intelligence officer for Michael Collins during the War of Independence: all of which is news to Griffin, who is foggy about both the War of Independence and Michael Collins.
Still, he’s impressed. “To find out they are heroes, in my eyes, is amazing,” he says.
In Kilkee, Co Clare, he delves into the background of his grandfather’s father, James Griffin – an Irish language activist (annoyingly Griffin keeps saying “Gaelic”) who went as Séamus Mór Ó Gríobhtha and who joined the IRB.
“I’ve always been a very proud British person,” says Griffin. “You can’t just pick and choose the good parts of history. You don’t get taught any of this in school. The British are always the heroes. That isn’t the reality.”
He is initially more reticent when it comes to his father’s side. His dad, Rodney, who moved from Jamaica aged 18, hasn’t always been in Dev’s life, and when they meet, you can see a distance between them.
But Griffin is nonetheless delighted to travel to Jamaica when he learns that his grandparents were expelled from their local church when his grandmother fell pregnant out of wedlock. That trip takes up the final third of the instalment and puts a fascinating capstone on an engaging exploration of the parallel experiences of Irish and Jamaican migrants to Britain.
“I feel I can confidently say I am Irish and Jamaican now,” he says in the sunshine. “Maybe for the first time ever, I truly belong somewhere.”
