In 2016, I moved from Ireland to the UK for the first time. In retrospect, it was not the right call. Following the same man whose job has recently taken me to Australia, I settled with him in a barn in the West Midlands, near Coventry.
My mother had died months before. The family home had been sold to pay for her care after a terminal cancer diagnosis, and I was utterly rudderless in the world. The urge to escape was in part a response to a sudden, intense sense that my conception of home had been obliterated. There was no “home” to return to. No family to seek refuge with. Leaving Ireland seemed as sensible a move as any other in a life that was suddenly unrecognisable.
It felt that if I didn’t belong anywhere, a barn outside Coventry was as serviceable a place as any to feel that way.
I was then in my mid-20s and unprepared for the reception my accent would generate in a rural English environment. My accent, I should add, is notions in the extreme. You’d call it Irish RP. It’s hardly my fault – an Irish Times reader once heard me on RTÉ and wrote to me that I’m “clearly only one of those fruity Anglo journos up in Dublin like the rest”, so it doesn’t always serve me well.
This is my mother’s doing. At the age of 13 she returned to Limerick from London, where she was born to Irish parents. She never lost the English accent which caused her hassle all her life. She was bullied at school, kicked and insulted for her Englishness. She was still considered “a blow-in” by some of our neighbours when she died in Limerick 45 years later. Narrowness is found everywhere, and not uniquely British. We’re good at it when we want to be. She “corrected” every hint of an accent away as, sensitive to bigotry, she thought it would hold me back in life. That, of course, is hugely bigoted.
I thought of my mother often when my red-trouser-wearing neighbour would bloviate tweedily across the barnyard from his substantial redbrick house to comment at the decibel level of a leaf blower or the smallness of our Christmas tree or claim he didn’t care to visit regional parts of the UK like Ireland.
In the local village, people would pick up on the accent and make mangled attempts to fire it back at me in a fluctuating cadence they considered funny, but which, ultimately, accumulated into numerous erosive interactions each week. I’d think of the reader letter and consider that truly one person’s “notions” is another’s “medieval-era peasant”.
Already grieving and feeling radically displaced, I found these interactions to be a toxic combination of slightly depressing and intensely boring. It’s soft stuff. The hangover of a colonial legacy that Irish people, among many others across the world who have it far worse, are left with the dehydration headache of. It isn’t violence or meaningful harm or serious oppression, but it is tedious gobshitery of the sort we’ve long been accustomed to.
The average British person is not well versed in their nation’s imperial history (or just history, as the rest of us call it), and not just in one village outside Coventry. I experienced similar gombeenism several years later when working among ostensibly more cosmopolitan people in London. Teaching a comprehensive form of British history in British schools would be understandably bad for morale.
I was surprised to discover that – so far, and it has only been a few weeks – it is easier to be Irish in Australia than it is an hour’s flight away in Britain. I carry less awareness of my Irishness here.
It feels as though this shouldn’t be the case somehow.
As though our immediate neighbours should probably have more connection and good will toward us than a people in another hemisphere. Australians I’ve interacted have encountered my accent with a sort of gentle disinterest and tend not to robe me in a one-dimensional identity the moment they twig that I’m not from around here. This is very much an improvement.
Their attitude to colonial history may be part of that, though I haven’t been here long enough to look under the hood of this theory. The recency of atrocities here has resulted in overt acknowledgment of Indigenous people and their contribution to Australian society. Particularly now with the 2023 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice Referendum in which Australians voted on whether to change the constitution to give the country’s first peoples more representation to advise parliament and the Australian government on issues impacting their communities. (More than 60 per cent voted no to the referendum, with all six states rejecting the proposal.)
There are open references to this country’s dark past. I’m new here. There is a lot I don’t know and I don’t doubt that this acknowledgment is likely incomplete and falls short. I haven’t failed to notice who appears to be systemically excluded and disadvantaged, though. It’s difficult not to notice. It is difficult not to notice that I can come and live here and live a comfortable life in which my identity doesn’t enter the room before me, while people born and raised here are denied a similar experience.
What feels novel to me as an Irish person though is any public admission of this grim history and wrongs committed. The cultural conversation. The acknowledgment of this country’s origins and resources and of what, in large part, it owes them to.
It might be argued away as lip service or deflection from meaningful efforts to change, but it is something.
It is not overt dismissal or myopia or unabashed national pride while ignoring the reality. It is something.
