Social History: Catherine Dunne's An Unconsidered People highlights the power of personal testimony to reveal the subjective meanings of individual acts of migration, writes Liam Harte.
In his trenchant 1989 analysis of 20th-century Irish politics and society, Joe Lee invokes the superior power of the writer to capture the "heartbreak and heroism" of the post-war generation of Irish economic migrants in Britain. The problem is, however, that only a tiny proportion of those who "took the boat" during the 1950s have left written accounts of their experiences. In order to get a fuller picture of these migrants' interior worlds, we need to listen as well as read. Interviews and oral history projects are a vital means of preserving the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, especially those who have been elided from the official version of Ireland's past. It is a pleasure, therefore, to read Catherine Dunne's An Unconsidered People, a book which highlights the power of personal testimony to reveal the subjective meanings of individual acts of migration.
Each of the 10 migrant narratives in this book is guided by a series of questions which probe the interviewees' reasons for leaving Ireland, their experiences of finding work and accommodation in London, and their feelings about religion, racism and integration. Dunne explains in her introduction that the interviews developed "more or less organically", with their subjects recommending others to whom she then spoke. While this method of personal referral has obvious benefits for a non-migrant researcher who conducted her investigations "at second remove", it has the disadvantage of creating a rather homogeneous group of subjects, almost all of whom come from southern, working-class, Catholic backgrounds. The fact that such people are representative of the 1950s emigrant wave does not excuse the neglect of Protestant and Northern Irish migrant minorities, whose absence underlines their more genuine claims to "unconsidered" status.
That said, these testimonies effectively overturn stereotypical perceptions of post-war Irish migrants as a mass of uneducated Paddies and Biddies whose lives revolved around the church, the pub and the dancehall. What emerges instead is a portrait of an emigrant community differentiated by gender, place of residence and patterns of belief. Questions about attitudes to Catholicism, for example, yield widely divergent responses. Some tell of staunch religious devotion in the midst of an aggressively materialistic culture, while others express a sense of abandonment by local clergy after financial debts had been cleared. Then there is Phyllis Izzard, who describes the trauma of trying to reconcile the demands of her faith with the liberating choices of the secular city. Her story of going to confession on the eve of her wedding, and then proceeding to Oxford Street to buy condoms for her honeymoon in Bognor Regis, vividly conveys the kinds of conflicted behaviour produced by the migration process.
Phyllis's candour is shared by her fellow interviewees, whose testimonies are remarkably free of both nostalgic revisionism and self-pitying claims of victimisation. In fact, there are surprisingly few reports of anti-Irish discrimination in these interviews. Instead, we find much anecdotal evidence of Irish people exploiting their own. There are tales of unscrupulous Irish landlords operating overcrowded hostels and tyrannical foremen victimising workers from their own counties. Father Seamus Fullam explains how this cycle of exploitation reproduces itself in the present: "And of course nowadays it's the Irish who are picking up the Latvian and Lithuanian workers outside the Crown in Cricklewood, and basically doing to others what was done to them: showing the same lack of compassion."
Throughout An Unconsidered People the hidden social history of the Irish in modern London continually flickers into view. Sheila Dillon, for instance, recalls her role in arranging secret adoptions for the babies of unmarried Irish girls, and the day she met a doctor who was one of her infant placements.
Similar stories of social concealment feature in Anne O'Neill's interview. She remembers the Irish women who had mixed-race children across the water, but were too fearful to tell their families back home. Again and again, one has the impression of London as a repository of Ireland's inadmissible social realities, a convenient place to consign those whose presence at home would threaten the nation's idealised image of itself.
Although these oral testimonies contain much local and cultural detail, it is important to locate them within the wider social and historical contexts of the Irish in Britain. Dunne's attempts to do so in her opening and concluding chapters are regrettably flawed. For one thing, she seems wholly unaware of important recent research based on interviews with Irish people who emigrated to London during the periods before and after the 1950s, which her own work complements. Nor does she appear to have fully considered the subtler social aspects of being Irish in England. Her repeated claim that the London Irish are "invisible" because they are white-skinned and English-speaking is a case in point, since it ignores the extent to which language and accent are powerful markers of identity.
As the mischievous modern adage has it, the English rarely realise that the Irish are black until they open their mouths.
Liam Harte lectures in the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster. He is currently compiling a critical anthology of autobiography by the Irish in modern Britain
An Unconsidered People: The Irish in London. By Catherine Dunne, New Island, 245pp, €11.99