I cried when I heard we were leaving, even though I had been suggesting we go for years.
Being English and a contrarian, I had always felt a little on the outside of Irish culture. If people in shops or taxi drivers took to me they would ask if I was Australian, American, Polish? Anything but the dreaded English.
Two years ago I was ambushed live on national radio when I was told I would be on a panel talking about St. Georges day with another English person and an Irish person, only to find myself fecked (thanks for that word – it will never leave my vocabulary) on air with the Trinity professor of Irish history. I was then forced to sit and listen to his idea of a brief run down of “the 8000 years of oppression”. Not being a history professor and not being prepared for this, I struggled to find the right tone – apologetic, but not responsible.
Ten years ago, when the Queen was giving out medals to the RUC for bravery, some of my office colleagues got quite cross with me. I understood their anger, which was verbally directed at me followed by them storming out of the office, but they hadn’t stopped to check whether I was a royalist, a republican or anything more deeply thought out.
My Irish ex-boyfriend, with whom I had a tempestuous relationship – to put it mildly – would often in a fit of rage tell me to go home to England.
It was often assumed, along the way of my 11 years in Ireland (from the age of 21-32), that sooner of later I would bugger off back to where I came from taking my plumy accent and ideas for women’s equality with me.
After this it will come as no surprise to anyone that I married an American.
Though we continued to live in Ireland we were both outsiders, him less of one than I.
I could go on with the woe is me stories but I loved many things about living in Ireland. The friends I made there are amazing. The schools my children went to were excellent. The lifestyle was easygoing and lots of fun. My neighbours were amazing people, who immigrated four months before we did, leaving our two sons hanging over the garden fence, looking in vain for their two children.
As soon as I had our children four and a half years ago, my homing instinct kicked in and I started on about moving back home, but my husband was having none of it. That was before the economy crashed and there became little option but London.
Only then did I realise how rooted I had become in Ireland, how much I loved the family home we had struggled to buy in 2007 and done up slowly since. How much I loved the fact that we knew all the neighbours and the kids could wander into their houses and how everyone helped each other out. The network of friends who did so much to help me and put up with me and socialised with me and read my children stories.
But I knew I was going home. I was going back to live 20 minutes from my parents and five minutes from my brother and sister-in-law. I was going back to the education system I went through, the working culture I understood and the pretty, affluent, towns and villages in which I grew up.
On my second day in Tunbridge Wells I walked into town to invest in some good shampoo. The day before some miserable old bag in Sainsbury, clearly a local, had spotted my three-year-old eating a bag of raisins and out the side of her mouth said “Hope you paid for that”.
The shampoo saleslady was much more pleasant. Over a cup of free tea (it had been -1 Degrees C outside all day long) we got chatting. I mentioned we had just moved from Dublin.
She lit up, “My whole family is from Cork”, she said. I lit up too – someone who understood.
And there it was. Finally, now I’ve left Ireland, I belong to the clan.
I’m not sure if it was because, in the end it was the Irish economy that forced me along with so many Irish people out, or whether it was that this girl, who had been brought from Macroom to Tunbridge Wells as a six month-old baby in the last bad Irish recession, also had a south-east English accent.
Whatever the reason, I suddenly felt at home for the first time since I moved home.
Nearly every country exists today because the ancestors conquered or exterminated some other native people. It seems so dumb to still see Irish nationalists complaining about events from centuries ago while ignoring the many barbarities of Irish history: slave-taking from post-Roman Britain, the probable invasion of Scotland by Irish (“Scotti” was a Roman term for an Irish group) and so on.
No modern person need feel shame or pride in events of distant history, events they had no role in. Modern Germans, for example, shouldn’t be proud of Bach or ashamed of Hitler. So screw the Trinity history professor, you needn’t be apologetic for anything!
Anyway good for you to feel at home finally
Amanda,
My boyfriend of ten years is English and we live together in Dingle, which can be a hot house of nationalist fervour to do with the language and feelings of republican pride. He has lived there for 16 years and for the first few years, he never ventured an opinion on anything contentious for fear of saying the wrong thing. But now, while he still isn’t informed enough to be able to argue 700 years of history (!), he refuses to bear the burden of any guilt of what happened in previous generations. Basically, he gives as good as he gets.
On the other hand, I have had unbelievable situations in England. At one, a BBQ in Sussex, the talk immediately changed to IRA outrages once they heard my accent, making me hugely uncomfortable. And at another, a dinner party in Hereford, I was seated next to the County Lieutenant (not sure if I have the terminology correct but he was the Queen’s representative in the county) who was taken aback that an Irish person could be educated to university standard and might have intelligent conversation to contribute to a dinner table!
So, I know how you feel. The relationship between Ireland and England is a complicated and very interesting one…
Ah my sympathies. We recently moved back to Ireland after leaving to go home 10 months ago when my husband lost his job. I really thought it was what I wanted, but we returned in August, having been miserable with just about everything in England and with our kids missing their Irish schools, GAA and the fabulous people in our little village here.
I’ve experienced exactly the stuff you mean: we live near the border, and once in Dundalk had to just carry on walking when a group of lads kicked the wing mirrors off our English-registered car, but generally the ribbing is good-natured. I do understand your longing for home, though, and wish you well, wherever you end up!
Whatever. You’ll be missed. x
I second that.
I had no idea you were vamoosing!? Why did you not insist on exit pints? I had a lot of that shite in the North. Turds pointing out my ROI-ness on a daily basis, either for or against, such grotesque tribalism and single-mindedness. I guess it goes on everywhere. Had the same tack in London years ago when the IRA were bombing the gonads off the financial district and the odd random mother-in-law walking along a UK pavement somewhere. It was my fault, in the company I worked in, and the ex-British army boss woman used to leave The Sun newspaper open on my keyboard in the morning, with grotesque anti-Irish headlines, and I was too shy to answer. When will we come to terms with the word ‘global’ and the concept of free movement (those of us lucky to have it or avail of it) without the tardy geographical put-down of low self esteem others? Best of luck to you in your new venture!
I was brought up in quite a conservative almost anti-republican household in Ireland and somehow still managed to absorb an anti-english bias. It certainly used to be socially acceptable and still is in some places to be anti-english. What changed it for me was the realisation that the majority of english people were under the boot of the english upper classes too. It’s a class issue, not a nationalistic one.
I feel very at home in england when I lived there and now when I continue to visit. We have so much in common the un-thinking prejuidiced on both sides are missing out.
Good luck Amanda – we’re just across the water and always here.
I also find the whole ‘anti-English’ thing to be so baffling too – the vast majority of Irish people surely have at least one relative of some stripe living and breeding there meaning that … SHOCK HORROR … lots of Irish people are now related to lots of English people. Therefore stop being so bloody silly. And if it’s such a problem, then stop supporting UK football teams to the tune of gajillions of euro each year. Selective jingosim, wha?