Polish-born Mikolaj Lesniak felt “like prey surrounded by predators” when he started to attend a Catholic, all-boys primary school in Ireland at the age of seven. “I was a very vulnerable young boy and tried to hide it,” he recalls.
He had already had to cope with a number of significant transitions in his young life. When he was two, his father left the family home in a small town in southern Poland in 2007 to earn more money elsewhere in the European Union, which their country had joined three years previously. Two years later, Lesniak and his mother joined his father, who was working then in a Kilkenny brewery.
“She always said that she did it for me, so I could have a better future.”
Going to a preschool where there was an educator from Poland, as well as some other Polish children, eased Lesniak into Irish education. He moved on to a mixed primary school and “my first real experience with properly learning English”. However, he took comfort from not being the only migrant child struggling in the classroom to keep up.
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Having always found communicating with girls easier at that school, it is no wonder that, when he had to transfer to an all-boys setting three years later, “the incredible feeling of fright still gives me shivers today”. But he understands why his very religious parents wanted him to go to the Christian Brothers school to “become a man”.
Lesniak recalls how he was always “the weird one” there, stuck in his own little world. Yet he never felt the need to become friends with the popular kids who were good at sport. Due to his far-from-perfect English he preferred to stick with children from multicultural backgrounds.
No one, not even his parents, could have predicted Lesniak’s next turn in life. He decided he wanted to go to the local gaelcholáiste, having a good gut feeling about the place. It was the one secondary school his parents had not considered. Shocked, but trusting in their son’s ability to manage, if that was his preference, they enrolled him.
“This was probably the most spontaneous but the best decision of my life up to that point,” writes Lesniak in his contribution to a new book, Polish Families in Ireland – A Life Course Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan). He is one of the so-called “1.5 generation”, a child brought by his parents to spend their formative years in a new country.
It is 20 years since Poland joined the EU, when Ireland was one of three countries, along with the UK and Sweden, to offer citizens of the new member states full access to jobs. The “push” of high unemployment in their native land and the “pull” of the Celtic Tiger soon resulted in tens of thousands of young Polish adults making their way here. The estimated 2,000-strong Polish population in Ireland in 2002 had risen to more than 63,000 by the time of the 2006 Census. Just two years later the Polish Statistical Office was reporting that around 200,000 Polish citizens were living in Ireland – right before the financial crash.
Migration tends to be viewed within an economic context but this new collection of academic writings, edited by Michelle Share, a research sociologist at Trinity College Dublin, and Alicja Bobek, a migration researcher at Technological University Dublin, delves into more of the complexities. It looks at social, cultural and intergenerational factors that shape migrants’ choices at different life stages.
Today the Polish community is the biggest non-Irish group in Ireland. Poles make up 15 per cent of the non-Irish population, according to 2022 Census figures, ahead of the 13 per cent from the UK. However, the number of residents from Poland has fallen significantly, with 28,835 fewer here in 2022 compared to the 122,515 recorded in 2016.
Lesniak’s first three months in gaelcholáiste were “completely hardcore”, he says. New subjects and new friends all through a new language. It was one more transition that gave an extra edge to his teenage quest for self-identity.
“Born in Poland, living in Ireland, speaking three languages daily. Looking in the mirror wondering – who really am I?” he writes. “All these situations were the reason for darker thoughts in my mind. Losing the sense of belonging is terrible.”
Although he did not encounter racism, “that does not mean I did not have any issues. I never felt Irish. I was not the typical Irish ‘lad’. The one with the sporty GAA lifestyle and fade skin and fringe haircut and Nike clothes.”
His sense of Polishness remained crucial to him and, as he grew more confident through acclimatising to the gaelcholáiste, he joined the local Polish school in Kilkenny. Again, this was his own idea, but his parents were pleased.
The lack of accessible and affordable childcare in Ireland is one particularly significant influence on emerging Polish families who do not have the well-established social supports of Irish peers
“Going into Polish school every Friday afternoon was like landing in Poland. The same feeling of excitement of being in an environment where I could enjoy learning and simply be myself.”
There are more than 50 Polish complementary schools, scattered through 19 counties in Ireland, and attended by an estimated 6,500 children. Five of these schools, which teach pupils the Polish language, history, geography and culture, are run under the auspices of the Embassy of Poland in Dublin; the rest are community ventures.
Other members of the 1.5 generation who participated in a longitudinal study on immigrant Polish teenagers, conducted by Beata Sokolowska, talk of great difficulties in making Irish friends. This was all the harder when they found themselves “trapped” within a younger age group if, due to their lack of proficiency in English, secondary schools insisted they start in first year, even though they had completed several years of second-level education in Poland.
Not only did the teenagers have social exclusion to contend with here, but then they experienced changed attitudes among old friends and neighbours in their motherland. “Suddenly, in the home country, these migrants became strangers, labelled, ostracised or even taken advantage of,” writes Sokolowska. These young adults had become the “in betweeners” – feeling neither Irish nor fully Polish.
Irish emigrants would have had experiences similar to those documented in this book, says Dr Share. However, with the UK, the US and Australia being the most common destinations, they have not had a language barrier to cope with as well.
Share’s interest in the Polish community started about 15 years ago, when she was researching Ireland’s weak childcare infrastructure and the resulting involvement of grandparents.
“I also started to observe what was going on around me in my neighbourhood. There were older women, presumably grandparents, pushing children around in prams, but they were not Irish grandmothers – they were Polish – speaking in Polish to their grandchild.”
It prompted her and a colleague to try to learn more about how one generation’s migration affects the generation before and after.
The majority of Polish migrants who came here for employment opportunities in the first years of EU enlargement were adults in their 20s, enjoying new freedom of movement, who had yet to start their own families. Share’s co-editor, Dr Bobek, was one of those. At the time she felt her move away from Poland would be permanent but, having been in the US for a year and a half before Ireland, she did not know where she might eventually settle.
It is common that immigrants come for one reason and stay for another, she suggests. Indeed this book aims to offer stories, many drawn from qualitative research, that illuminate how migration is not a one-off event but rather a process.
“Migration is just a pathway through a life course, rather than something that you should be categorised as for your whole life,” says Bobek, who now has dual citizenship.
On arrival in Ireland she avoided emphasising her Polishness until after meeting her Irish husband, Shaun McGranaghan. “I wanted to fully integrate. But then I realised that you can be both and it’s not a problem. It’s actually a positive attribute to be multicultural rather than something that you need to lose.”
Motherhood renewed a desire to observe traditional rituals such as a Polish Christmas with the couple’s now five-year-old son, Aidan McGranaghan, who is “incognito Polish”, Bobek jokes. She has spoken to him in her mother tongue since birth (he answers her in English), first and foremost for the benefit of a bilingual upbringing. “It opens up your brain,” she says.
But she also realised that when she brings him back to Poland for summer holidays, “he can understand everything and it’s kind of cool – and he feels cool about it”.
Local customs and circumstances inevitably shape migrants’ attitudes to parenthood. The lack of accessible and affordable childcare in Ireland is one particularly significant influence on emerging Polish families who do not have the well-established social supports of Irish peers.
This can go a number of ways. Grandmothers, as mentioned earlier, may be drawn here from Poland, where women can retire at 60. Or Polish women here may find themselves becoming more of a traditional “Mother Pole” than they had intended, if childcare proves to be insurmountable obstacle to returning to employment. In other cases, where working couples can juggle childcare in relay shifts, fatherhood becomes much more hands on for Polish men than the male “provider” model they grew up with.
Meanwhile, Mikolaj Lesniak is now aged 19 and chose to take a gap year rather than go straight on to third-level education after completing his Leaving Certificate last June. He is working part-time as a sales assistant in Kilkenny while also being an active volunteer in the support of his local and ethnic communities.
“My involvement in the book has deepened my understanding of the critical need for support for 1.5 generation children in Ireland,” he says. “To enhance my ability to provide such support, I became a certified Erasmus+ leader and completed training with NYCI [National Youth Council of Ireland] and Tusla.” He is also looking forward to enrolling in college next year to study journalism and political science.
“I am a strong advocate,” he adds, “for the implementation of governmental support programmes and psychological assistance for 1.5 generation children.”
He himself has walked in those shoes to adulthood.
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