The Cloherty siblings wear their grief lightly yet a flicker hangs in the air as we discuss the loss last year of their father, Sean. Amid their laughter at their funny tales, you notice the occasional halting moment.
It might be a split-second lingering of silence or a glance after recounting a particularly treasured memory – a remembrance that he has now gone. Barely 11 months after he died from cancer, it is clear Cloherty, who was 74, was loved and is missed.
His five children – Patrick, Katie, Mary, Mike and Sean jnr – have gathered in the sittingroom of the house where, with his late wife Maureen, the hard-working Connemara man raised them and where Katie now lives with her own family.
The scene is unmistakably Irish. The traditional fireplace looks like many you would find in rural west of Ireland. The Clohertys ferry in endless cups of tea to fuel the chat. The deceased man’s brother, Padraig, similar in age to him, sits quietly in the corner, occasionally chiming in. This family, of humble, easy-going people reminisce as the Irish like to do over their dead.
Yet this isn’t Ireland. We are in Lydiate, a neat hamlet 15km north of Liverpool. Sean Cloherty, second eldest of nine, left an impoverished existence on Lettermore island in the early 1960s to move to Britain for work, before he was 16.
He could speak only Irish when he arrived – it would be two years before he gained fluency in English. Before he died, he recalled that, all those years ago, he “had to go to help my mother” by sending money home. Lettermore was ruggedly beautiful but harsh on its children.
Cloherty worked laying pipes and as a builder. He created a solid life in England where the siblings were all born. They all retain a strong sense of Irish identity after visiting Lettermore all their lives – their late mother Maureen’s father, a Loftus, was from Mayo.
The Clohertys would be typical, engaged second-generation Irish Britons if such a term was in use – but it almost never is. In contrast with Irish Americans, there is no equivalent moniker for our nation’s kin to the east. As we discuss their Irish identity, laughter rolls in from outside where the third generation, Katie’s girls, play. Upstairs are their Galway GAA jerseys.
“Our Irishness made us proud,” says Katie in a gentle Scouse lilt. “When we were young it made us different, like we had a proper story to tell.”
Mike remembers banging on his neighbours windows when he was a kid to tease them after the Republic beat England at football – it may have been Euro 88. He defines his Irishness in terms of values and attributes – hard work, kindness to neighbours – passed on from his father.
Katie, who has embraced the identity most keenly, did Irish studies up to master’s level at college. To Mary, “Lettermore is my Dad, my grandparents”. Sean jnr doesn’t see Ireland as his home, but the land of his roots – he likes to tour it on his motorbike. Meanwhile, the youngest, Patrick, describes a physical longing for Lettermore – visiting the island “grounds” him with childhood memories. Rocks are where they always were, ocean views still the same.
“My Irishness is a blend of a melancholic feeling mixed in with pride. I know that is an idealistic view of things, but I really feel my Irishness in the call to go back and visit,” says Patrick. They recorded their father’s story before he died as part of an oral history project, Looking Back to Look Forward, run by the representative group Irish in Britain.
There are six million in Britain with at least one Irish grandparent – 9 per cent of the population. At the post-Brexit peak, more than 100,000 Britons per year applied for Irish passports. Yet in 2021, 565,000, less than 1 per cent of people in Britain, ticked the “White Irish” box on the census, and three-quarters of those were immigrants born in Ireland.
The story of Irish emigration to Britain – such as those who came to London’s Kilburn to “work on the buildings” – has been told often. Less is known at home about Irish Britons, the children and grandchildren of those who made the journey.
Academic data suggests they are more upwardly mobile than the average British citizen. A study by Mary J Hickman, now a fellow at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, suggests their upward mobility increased if they had two parents from the Republic. Irish Britons are at the highest levels of UK government – Pat McFadden, one of the most senior British cabinet members, is a Glasgow son of Irish-speaking Donegal parents.
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There is ample evidence of prominent second- and third-generation Irishness all over Britain. Yet the question remains as to why Irish Britons are less feted in their ancestral homeland than Irish Americans, and whether that makes some less enthusiastic about expressing it.
There is also a clear difference found in academic studies between the second- and third-generation Irish experience in England, where it was more prosperous, and in Scotland, where sectarianism and poverty were rife, especially around Glasgow. Scottish-Irish communities were more cloistered.
Data aside, later-generation Irishness in Britain is a feeling as much as anything. For the Clohertys, their Irish identity is clear and unabashed. For others, it is more nuanced.
John Swaine (62), a London black-cab driver, is the son of two Irish parents who emigrated to Britain about 65 years ago. His Wicklow-born father, Joe Swaine, died aged 80 in Hertfordshire during the first wave of Covid in 2020. His mother, Meath-born Theresa, died in 2015.
Swaine is among the hundreds of thousands of Britons who are proud owners of a new Irish passport. His sense of warm regard for his parents’ homeland remains intact. But he doesn’t readily play up his Irish identity. He is not, as some are derided in the UK, a “plastic Paddy”. A more recent offshoot of this derogatory term are the “passport Paddies” who seek the citizenship they are entitled to for pragmatic reasons.
Swaine is realistic about his connection to Ireland, which he has visited once in the last 45 years – a wedding near Carlingford Lough about 15 years ago. Like the Clohertys, he travelled over to see his grandparents each summer as a child. But he stopped after his late teens. No particular reason, he says. He loved it when he did visit. But Swaine sees himself clearly as an Englishman, just one with Irish ancestry.
“If I went over to Ireland now, people there would consider me English. I feel like I am English. But the other side of it is that I love the fact of my Irish background. I am proud of it. I’d never speak badly of it and if I was in company and I heard someone trashing Ireland, I’d say something.”
His late father Joe was mischievous, the sort with a permanent twinkle in his eye. Swaine recalls that as he entered adulthood, he and his father would, every Christmas Day, have a facetious debate about whether the son was Irish or English: “My Dad would say ‘you’re Irish’. I’d say I was English. It was like a religious thing, this back and forth. That’s just how we were.”
He wonders if this desire to delineate himself contributed towards his understated attitude to Ireland. His main motivation in seeking an Irish passport, he says, was a reaction to European Union travel rules for British people after Brexit. But rummaging through documents such as his parent’s birth certificates sparked curiosity about his heritage.
Swaine has a decent knowledge of the basics of Irish current affairs – he is a London black-cab driver after all. He also retains an outside interest in Irish sports, although he doesn’t seek them out. “I’d chat about Irish stuff to my cabbie mates if something was on the news, but that’s about it.”
Yet, unprompted, Swaine can still accurately describe from memory the 1.5km route from Enniskerry to his grandparents old house in Parknasillogue – every turn and undulation. This journalist knows his recollection to be correct because we walked the same roads, sharing that set of grandparents.
“I haven’t thought of that since I was a kid,” says Swaine, surprised at himself. “It’s unreal how that just came into my mind. That memory or connection to Ireland was buried. It must run deep.”
Swaine believes his English accent will always limit the degree of Irishness people in Ireland will ascribe to him.
That chimes with the experience of Morag Prunty, a London-born Irish novelist who writes under the pen name Kate Kerrigan. She has toured over the past year or so with a one-woman play, Am I Irish Yet?, about her desperate wish to be accepted as fully Irish. She now lives in Mayo.
The crowd during an Irish Times visit for a matinee performance at the Liverpool Irish Centre earlier this month is mostly older women. Judging by Prunty’s interactions with audience members, they are also acutely plugged in to her message that there is a blockage in the homeland for second- and third-generation Irish Britons.
“If you’re English and Irish at the same time like I am, it’s a bit of a problem,” she tells them. “I was born in the UK [but] always felt like I had to apologise for that ... I am not plastic.”
Bronwen Walter, emerita professor at Anglia Ruskin University in the southeast of England, is a retired expert on Irish migration to Britain. She co-wrote a major study of second- and third-generation Irish in Britain – the Irish 2 project, albeit two decades ago.
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She has written that people of Irish descent in Britain are “frequently overlooked ... certainly not feted ... and often reminded of their inauthenticity” by those of us born on the island. Yet many Irish Britons' strong sense of Irish identity perseveres, and can grow through the generations.
“We often were surprised to find that third-generation Irish identity could be even stronger,” Walter told The Irish Times last week. “They had missed out on the downsides of being Irish in Britain – the Troubles, etc – and got the benefits."
Earlier this month, the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, London, launched an intergenerational project in conjunction with local Sacred Heart Catholic High School, in which the girls, many with Irish ancestry, filmed interviews with older first-generation London Irish about their immigrant experience.
On the day The Irish Times observes, the interviews are conducted by Year Nine students (aged about 13). They include Ellie Honan, whose roots are in Dublin and Tipperary – her mother and grandmother on her father’s side are Irish. Violet Fitzgibbon, who has two sets of Irish grandparents from Clare and Drogheda, also takes part, along with fellow student Sesina Dawit, who has no Irish ancestry but is fascinated.
Ellie and Violet profess a strong Irish identity. Ellie sees her ancestral homeland as “a family place”. Her two most positive associations with it are “the people and the seaside”. Violet says everybody in her house supports Ireland over England in the rugby. Both girls agree that one of the biggest differentiators from the UK is that Irish people always say goodbye and thank you to bus drivers.
