‘Get away from me, you Irish bitch! I don’t want you touching me… get back to the bog you crawled out of… murdering bastards…’ he yelled at me, his face red and distorted, almost unrecognisable.
I had approached him expecting his usual cheery greeting but instead found a stranger in his bed. We had chatted about films, hobbies, and holidays while I had assisted him with his personal care, coaxed him to eat, and as he leaned on me while I supported him walking. I had washed and shaved his face and wiped the sweat from his brow, had spoken calming words when the fear-filled brown eyes had appealed to me for reassurance. Now they looked out at me through two small slits that burned with hatred. I had worn a mask when changing his dressings but it appeared that he had been wearing a mask of his own, feigning friendship when all the while he despised me.
I took a step forward with my heart beating beneath my student nurse’s uniform, shocked and scared, my hands stretched out holding his medication. The ward behind me, so busy only moments before, had fallen still and silent.
‘Get that Papist away from me,’ he shrieked, glancing around at the white-coated figures now frozen like statues.
I gripped the plastic medicine pot more tightly in my trembling hands. He adjusted his position to aim another barrage of insults and abuse at me. I stared at him in disbelief and dismay, stunned by the naked aggression of a patient who I thought I knew.
Whispers and movement around me roused me from my trance-like state. I turned around and saw a phlebotomist peering from behind a screen. She withdrew her head when our eyes met.
I made my way along the Nightingale ward under the watching eyes of the patients in the two rows of beds that flanked the long ward. A doctor buried his head deeper into the case notes he was holding as I passed him. I walked past two of my nursing colleagues who hastily looked away and resumed the tasks they had been doing. The figure of the ward sister suddenly loomed into view and passing me, told me to wait in her office. I fought back the tears lest they were taken as a sign of weakness and unprofessional behaviour.
I stood looking out of the office window at the small garden where peace and tranquillity reigned while indoors war raged in a man’s heart. Sister entered the office. She looked at me poker-face while giving me a list of tasks that would keep me off the ward for the rest of the morning. She never mentioned what had occurred. After lunch, I returned to the ward but the verbal assault resumed and once more, I was standing in sister’s office. Again, she never referred to the incident. She had taken the off-duty rota down from the board and noted that the following two days were my days off. She said the ward was not too busy and as my end of first year exams were looming, I could have the afternoon off as study leave. Shy and fearful of blotting my progress reports, I bit my tongue and swallowed the indignation and sense of injustice that was choking me.
Back in the Nurses Home, I threw myself on my bed and sobbed into the pillow. I felt very small and solitary. I was eighteen-years-of-age, a first-year student nurse, and had not felt so far from my home in Ireland even during the early bouts of homesickness. I lay there all afternoon and into the evening with waves of different emotions rising and falling inside me; sadness, anger, doubt, loneliness, fear, confusion, and sense of alienation. I felt completely let down and betrayed that such a sustained public display of racial abuse had been unacknowledged and I had been neatly and clinically dispatched as though I was the problem. I began to think I had made a dreadful mistake in coming to England. The ward incident was not my first encounter with anti-Irish feeling inside and outside hospitals. Racism in its many guises was something that would be part of my life as an Irish immigrant.
I arrived in Liverpool in the spring of 1979, a time of high political tension with the ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland. The ‘No dogs, No Blacks, No Irish’ signs of the 50s and 60s were gone but I encountered other overt and subtle unwelcoming messages. The murder of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA in August of that year killed some of my budding friendships. Accusations and assumptions of my allegiance to the IRA were hurled at me and nothing I said could dispel the suspicion. The 1980s were dark days in Northern Ireland with the H-block hunger strikes, unrelenting violence and the IRA bombing campaign in England. On a night out, I was rescued by a policeman in the street from a verbally aggressive woman whose anger and threats escalated to a physical attack. I was followed and had stones thrown at me by a teenage boy who had overheard me in a shop. After that, I rarely spoke when out in public areas or only in very low tones. He told me the reason he stoned was that his brother was a British soldier serving in Northern Ireland and had stones and bullets fired at him. He said he wished he had a gun. My attempt at hiding the bruises on my legs by wearing black tights instead of the regulation American Tan only served to get me into trouble with the Matron. Of course, I had been aware Irish people faced widespread distrust, discrimination, and violence in Britain but nothing can prepare you for being on the receiving end of hatred and ignorance or being face-to-face with someone who sees you as a deadly enemy. I never mentioned my experiences of racism to family and friends for fear of worrying them. Some who had lived in England and themselves experienced hostility eyed me suspiciously whenever I denied meeting any anti-Irish feeling apart from Irish jokes.
Unlike the younger generation of Irish coming to Britain in recent years, there were no mobile phones, social media, or cheap flights to connect with friends and family. Not only did the sea divide me from my loved ones but also the experience of emigrating. Only those who have emigrated can truly understand that hollow feeling of disconnection and fracture, of being uprooted like a tree. To counter the sense of isolation in the early days, I went to events at the local Irish Centre with some of the Irish nurses. There I connected with other first and second- generation Irish people and found a sense of community and belonging that felt like home, if only for a few short hours. One or two of my colleagues saw this as a sign of rejection even though I still socialised with them. Often minority groups are accused of isolating themselves from the people of their adopted country. My own experience is that we were happy to assimilate but as exiles, needed to join together with others who shared and understood our specific experiences and our culture. To me, going to the Irish centre was no different to an English person being a member of a jazz club, or following a particular football club. To avoid hostility, today’s immigrants also cling to their own communities just as the Irish did. But it is more difficult to evade hostile attacks and try to remain hidden when the colour of your skin or your features readily identify you to those who so easily hate. As an immigrant, it seems whatever you do is somehow judged and viewed in a different light. So much of the hostility now directed at Muslim communities echo the experiences of the Irish community. The hatred in some hearts has not gone away, just new targets identified for discrimination and violence.
The history of Ireland and Britain have long been interlinked. I grew up in Dublin and daily walked past statues and buildings that still bear the bullet marks from the 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence. I left my country but did not escape its history. On occasions, I considered abandoning my career and returning to Ireland but economic practicalities, and a mix of stoicism and stubbornness kept me doggedly following the path of my dreams. Liverpool is a city with strong links to Ireland. Emigrants, Catholic and Protestant, made their homes there and left their imprints on its names, language and people. They brought the renowned Irish friendliness and quick humour to the city which helped to make Liverpool feel like home over the years. But the old animosities came with them too. I quickly learnt that we do not live in a vacuum for our personal circle is bounded by another larger circle that impacts directly on the individual. Before arriving in Liverpool, I had never encountered a member of the Orange Lodge and I soon found that I attracted their attention when our paths crossed.
The 1980s were also a time of high unemployment and other social ills and there were people who saw me as another immigrant taking the job of a local. Immigrants are so often viewed as the source of political, economic, and social ills such as unemployment, low wages, lack of housing. The stranger is seen as a threat, taking what is not theirs. This is encouraged by the powerful and wealthy and aided by the media for it deflects from the true causes of economic and social problems. When people feel vulnerable and fearful about their lives or livelihoods, they become defensive and warmth and compassion are replaced by anger and rage and turned onto the outsider. The 80s saw my political awakening in the wake of the 1982 Toxteth riots and during the course of my work and day-to-day life. I became more aware of the issues and problems experienced by other ethnic communities and came to realise that my own experiences were similar to theirs in many ways. We others were a larger group that I had first thought.
I have now been an Irish immigrant in England for over forty years. Though my accent is not as strong, it still sets me apart. I remain other. When I left Ireland I believed, like so many Irish, that the leaving was temporary and I would return. I was going to train and work in Liverpool which is not far from Dublin and I viewed the small expanse of Irish Sea separating the two as a watery road instead of an asphalt one. Had I been going to America or Australia I would have seen myself as an emigrant but it was only England, a stone’s throw away. I arrived on a sunny March morning and the cold air slapped my face as I stepped out onto the deck of the ferry and surveyed the entrance to the port of Liverpool. Gulls swooped low over the water and I tasted the salt on my lips from the spray rising over the rail. The three iconic waterfront buildings stood majestically in the morning light with the Liver Birds above, their wings spread as though about to fly up into the blue cloudless sky. The clock below showed six-thirty. The captain’s voice came over the tannoy announcing that the ferry would dock in thirty minutes. I had arrived. All the months of planning and preparation were behind me. I turned and looked back in the direction we had come through the night and felt that sickening tug in my guts for the very first time. Everything familiar and loved was back there. The sounds of waves against the side of the boat and thundering of the engines sent a coldness through me. It suddenly occurred to me that thousands before me had been in the same geographical and emotional place that I occupied including past generations of my own family. They had all crossed the Irish Sea, that sea of tears, and experienced that long look backwards. Docked, I joined the orderly queue at arrivals, showed my hospital letter to the officials and answered their questions. I felt a little frightened when I noticed a young man being led away and remembered the experience of a friend’s brother who had been held for twelve hours, but I was waved through and made my way to the hospital. I had become one of the faceless many who made up the UK immigration figures for 1979. I was also one among the countless Irish girls who came to Britain to become nurses in the NHS and without whom it would have been critically short of nurses. Today it is still reliant on foreign staff and many are actively recruited from India, Nigeria, and Europe by the NHS.
Many immigrants know what it means to be victims of circumstance in their own country, only to find themselves victims in their adopted land. I see so many similarities between my own experiences and family history and those of other ethnic groups in the past and today. In Europe, there is a refugee crisis with people fleeing in desperation from war torn countries, taking their chances in overcrowded boats. Images of desperate people, bombed homes, and famine-stricken bodies appear on my television screen. I see a small child lying on the beach, so loved by children as a place to run and build sand castles, paddle and swim. He lies in his red top and navy trousers, motionless, his dark head to one side, with the water lapping around him. Later, his limp body is gently carried by a rescuer, his tiny arms and legs dangling. There is one set of footprints in the sand, those of the man, and I think of the poem about the single set of footprints being those of Jesus carrying the afflicted. A toddler, another body among many other bodies of children and adults, desperate people, washed up on the shore like driftwood. They took their chances with the wild unpredictable power of the sea in overcrowded boats, sometimes in drifting dinghies, and lost the gamble, paid with their lives. No warm cosy beds, no lullabies and gentle sounds lulling these children to sleep. And I cannot help thinking of the ‘coffin ships’ taking the starving and the poor from famine-stricken Ireland to Liverpool and New York, and the many men, women and children including my ancestors who died on the way. In Liverpool, there is a plaque to Irish Famine victims who flooded into the city at that awful time. Beneath a car park are the bodies of hundreds of Irish people who died in the local workhouse. That influx of Irish refugees was met with a hostile reaction and the authorities sent many of them back to Ireland; to the hunger, typhoid and cholera. Accounts in newspapers and government documents of the time make chilling reading and echo contemporary attitudes. When I hear the vitriol directed at today’s migrants, I cannot but feel sad, angry and connected to these refugees and exiles. As an Irish emigrant, some things set me apart and make me distinctly Irish but I understand emigrants from other countries, for our stories are similar. Only the names and the colour of the skin have changed.
Life as an Irish immigrant became easier during the 1990s and into the 2000s with the growing popularity of Irish theme pubs and the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. Anti-Irish feeling and stereotypes faded away but sadly such attitudes rarely disappear completely. The perennial Irish stereotype of the ‘Thick Mick’ and the Irish joke are still around. Even people who genuinely wanted to get to know me used them as ice breakers and didn’t seem to see the irony and insult of telling an Irish joke to an Irish person. For some, encountering a blonde Irish woman often proved too good an opportunity to miss and what ensued was often a heady cocktail of racist and sexist comments.
I am now rooted in my adopted environment but that initial cut has left a permanent wound that when prodded by sights, or memories, quietly weeps. I stand on the summit of a mountain and have a 360-degree panoramic view of the Lake District. Opposite, the Scafell massif rises to its pinnacle as the highest peak in England and below, Wastwater, the deepest lake in the country empties out to run to the Irish Sea. I look beyond the dome of Sellafield to the line of coast in the far distance and see the hazy outline of the Irish coast, the land of my birth. I stand surveying the physical landscape and the landscape of my life.
I, like thousands of other Irish immigrants and those from many lands have contributed much to our adopted country. We have been servants, labourers, construction workers, miners, carers, and professionals from different disciplines, and all have helped in keeping the wheels of the British economy and society turning. We have contributed our labour and skills and some paid with their lives like my great-grand-father who worked and died in the steel works of the North East. My grandfather worked on the Liverpool Docks in the early decade of the last century. My Irish-born grand-uncle tended the wounded and dying as a medic on the fields of France during WW1. My mother, second generation Irish, was a nurse in the NHS from its inception and her brother, my uncle, was a WW2 bomber pilot.
To be a nurse is a privilege for we witness so much about life, death and being human. It’s a cliché but nevertheless true; we are all born, we laugh, cry, suffer, rejoice, bleed, and we all die. As a nurse and an immigrant, I have learnt there is no ‘other’, no ‘not me’, just human beings and every human life is of equal value. Creating distinctions narrows us down, creates fear and problems, smothers our positive human qualities, our humanity and compassion. It would be a happier and safer world if we remembered that despite our different backgrounds and ethnicity, we are connected by our shared humanity.
So, I stand on an island looking towards the island on which I was born but I am not an island. I was born into my family unit and into my national family and I am immensely proud of both but there is a larger family beyond them to which I equally belong. Being part of one national family does not, should not, cut us off from the rest of the human community. That has been the lesson of my experiences as an immigrant. When empathy and compassion die and are replaced by judgemental attitudes and victim-blaming we have arrived on a dangerous shore.
I peer through the haze trying to getting a clearer view of my native land but I cannot see it just as I cannot see into the future. I can only see shapes emerging here and there. So, it is with my continuing experience as an Irish immigrant. There is a dark cloud in the form of Brexit hanging over the relative brighter days of trust and acceptance that became familiar to Irish immigrants. Shadows are emerging, striking out, attacking Irish people physically and verbally and I hear some of the old rhetoric in the street and on the TV screen from politicians. I am frightened and sad. We are going around in circles and meeting ourselves again. But I refuse to despair at the anti-Irish feeling that is beginning to resurface. I trust there are enough people who believe in the perennial philosophy of love thy neighbour. After forty years, I have learnt that lesson, the haters are few in comparison to those who accepted and embraced me.
So, I will continue to keep the Irish Christmas Eve night tradition of placing a lit candle in the window as a welcoming beacon to those in need of shelter. It is symbolic of welcome, warmth, and love, the qualities that make us human. I look out over the expanse of land and sea and something I learned at school comes into my head.
‘Who is my neighbour?’ ‘My neighbour is all mankind.’
I took a step forward with my heart beating beneath my student nurse’s uniform, shocked and scared, my hands stretched out holding his medication. The ward behind me, so busy only moments before, had fallen still and silent.
‘Get that Papist away from me,’ he shrieked, glancing around at the white-coated figures now frozen like statues.
I gripped the plastic medicine pot more tightly in my trembling hands. He adjusted his position to aim another barrage of insults and abuse at me. I stared at him in disbelief and dismay, stunned by the naked aggression of a patient who I thought I knew.
Whispers and movement around me roused me from my trance-like state. I turned around and saw a phlebotomist peering from behind a screen. She withdrew her head when our eyes met.
I made my way along the Nightingale ward under the watching eyes of the patients in the two rows of beds that flanked the long ward. A doctor buried his head deeper into the case notes he was holding as I passed him. I walked past two of my nursing colleagues who hastily looked away and resumed the tasks they had been doing. The figure of the ward sister suddenly loomed into view and passing me, told me to wait in her office. I fought back the tears lest they were taken as a sign of weakness and unprofessional behaviour.
I stood looking out of the office window at the small garden where peace and tranquillity reigned while indoors war raged in a man’s heart. Sister entered the office. She looked at me poker-face while giving me a list of tasks that would keep me off the ward for the rest of the morning. She never mentioned what had occurred. After lunch, I returned to the ward but the verbal assault resumed and once more, I was standing in sister’s office. Again, she never referred to the incident. She had taken the off-duty rota down from the board and noted that the following two days were my days off. She said the ward was not too busy and as my end of first year exams were looming, I could have the afternoon off as study leave. Shy and fearful of blotting my progress reports, I bit my tongue and swallowed the indignation and sense of injustice that was choking me.
Back in the Nurses Home, I threw myself on my bed and sobbed into the pillow. I felt very small and solitary. I was eighteen-years-of-age, a first-year student nurse, and had not felt so far from my home in Ireland even during the early bouts of homesickness. I lay there all afternoon and into the evening with waves of different emotions rising and falling inside me; sadness, anger, doubt, loneliness, fear, confusion, and sense of alienation. I felt completely let down and betrayed that such a sustained public display of racial abuse had been unacknowledged and I had been neatly and clinically dispatched as though I was the problem. I began to think I had made a dreadful mistake in coming to England. The ward incident was not my first encounter with anti-Irish feeling inside and outside hospitals. Racism in its many guises was something that would be part of my life as an Irish immigrant.
I arrived in Liverpool in the spring of 1979, a time of high political tension with the ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland. The ‘No dogs, No Blacks, No Irish’ signs of the 50s and 60s were gone but I encountered other overt and subtle unwelcoming messages. The murder of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA in August of that year killed some of my budding friendships. Accusations and assumptions of my allegiance to the IRA were hurled at me and nothing I said could dispel the suspicion. The 1980s were dark days in Northern Ireland with the H-block hunger strikes, unrelenting violence and the IRA bombing campaign in England. On a night out, I was rescued by a policeman in the street from a verbally aggressive woman whose anger and threats escalated to a physical attack. I was followed and had stones thrown at me by a teenage boy who had overheard me in a shop. After that, I rarely spoke when out in public areas or only in very low tones. He told me the reason he stoned was that his brother was a British soldier serving in Northern Ireland and had stones and bullets fired at him. He said he wished he had a gun. My attempt at hiding the bruises on my legs by wearing black tights instead of the regulation American Tan only served to get me into trouble with the Matron. Of course, I had been aware Irish people faced widespread distrust, discrimination, and violence in Britain but nothing can prepare you for being on the receiving end of hatred and ignorance or being face-to-face with someone who sees you as a deadly enemy. I never mentioned my experiences of racism to family and friends for fear of worrying them. Some who had lived in England and themselves experienced hostility eyed me suspiciously whenever I denied meeting any anti-Irish feeling apart from Irish jokes.
Unlike the younger generation of Irish coming to Britain in recent years, there were no mobile phones, social media, or cheap flights to connect with friends and family. Not only did the sea divide me from my loved ones but also the experience of emigrating. Only those who have emigrated can truly understand that hollow feeling of disconnection and fracture, of being uprooted like a tree. To counter the sense of isolation in the early days, I went to events at the local Irish Centre with some of the Irish nurses. There I connected with other first and second- generation Irish people and found a sense of community and belonging that felt like home, if only for a few short hours. One or two of my colleagues saw this as a sign of rejection even though I still socialised with them. Often minority groups are accused of isolating themselves from the people of their adopted country. My own experience is that we were happy to assimilate but as exiles, needed to join together with others who shared and understood our specific experiences and our culture. To me, going to the Irish centre was no different to an English person being a member of a jazz club, or following a particular football club. To avoid hostility, today’s immigrants also cling to their own communities just as the Irish did. But it is more difficult to evade hostile attacks and try to remain hidden when the colour of your skin or your features readily identify you to those who so easily hate. As an immigrant, it seems whatever you do is somehow judged and viewed in a different light. So much of the hostility now directed at Muslim communities echo the experiences of the Irish community. The hatred in some hearts has not gone away, just new targets identified for discrimination and violence.
The history of Ireland and Britain have long been interlinked. I grew up in Dublin and daily walked past statues and buildings that still bear the bullet marks from the 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence. I left my country but did not escape its history. On occasions, I considered abandoning my career and returning to Ireland but economic practicalities, and a mix of stoicism and stubbornness kept me doggedly following the path of my dreams. Liverpool is a city with strong links to Ireland. Emigrants, Catholic and Protestant, made their homes there and left their imprints on its names, language and people. They brought the renowned Irish friendliness and quick humour to the city which helped to make Liverpool feel like home over the years. But the old animosities came with them too. I quickly learnt that we do not live in a vacuum for our personal circle is bounded by another larger circle that impacts directly on the individual. Before arriving in Liverpool, I had never encountered a member of the Orange Lodge and I soon found that I attracted their attention when our paths crossed.
The 1980s were also a time of high unemployment and other social ills and there were people who saw me as another immigrant taking the job of a local. Immigrants are so often viewed as the source of political, economic, and social ills such as unemployment, low wages, lack of housing. The stranger is seen as a threat, taking what is not theirs. This is encouraged by the powerful and wealthy and aided by the media for it deflects from the true causes of economic and social problems. When people feel vulnerable and fearful about their lives or livelihoods, they become defensive and warmth and compassion are replaced by anger and rage and turned onto the outsider. The 80s saw my political awakening in the wake of the 1982 Toxteth riots and during the course of my work and day-to-day life. I became more aware of the issues and problems experienced by other ethnic communities and came to realise that my own experiences were similar to theirs in many ways. We others were a larger group that I had first thought.
I have now been an Irish immigrant in England for over forty years. Though my accent is not as strong, it still sets me apart. I remain other. When I left Ireland I believed, like so many Irish, that the leaving was temporary and I would return. I was going to train and work in Liverpool which is not far from Dublin and I viewed the small expanse of Irish Sea separating the two as a watery road instead of an asphalt one. Had I been going to America or Australia I would have seen myself as an emigrant but it was only England, a stone’s throw away. I arrived on a sunny March morning and the cold air slapped my face as I stepped out onto the deck of the ferry and surveyed the entrance to the port of Liverpool. Gulls swooped low over the water and I tasted the salt on my lips from the spray rising over the rail. The three iconic waterfront buildings stood majestically in the morning light with the Liver Birds above, their wings spread as though about to fly up into the blue cloudless sky. The clock below showed six-thirty. The captain’s voice came over the tannoy announcing that the ferry would dock in thirty minutes. I had arrived. All the months of planning and preparation were behind me. I turned and looked back in the direction we had come through the night and felt that sickening tug in my guts for the very first time. Everything familiar and loved was back there. The sounds of waves against the side of the boat and thundering of the engines sent a coldness through me. It suddenly occurred to me that thousands before me had been in the same geographical and emotional place that I occupied including past generations of my own family. They had all crossed the Irish Sea, that sea of tears, and experienced that long look backwards. Docked, I joined the orderly queue at arrivals, showed my hospital letter to the officials and answered their questions. I felt a little frightened when I noticed a young man being led away and remembered the experience of a friend’s brother who had been held for twelve hours, but I was waved through and made my way to the hospital. I had become one of the faceless many who made up the UK immigration figures for 1979. I was also one among the countless Irish girls who came to Britain to become nurses in the NHS and without whom it would have been critically short of nurses. Today it is still reliant on foreign staff and many are actively recruited from India, Nigeria, and Europe by the NHS.
Many immigrants know what it means to be victims of circumstance in their own country, only to find themselves victims in their adopted land. I see so many similarities between my own experiences and family history and those of other ethnic groups in the past and today. In Europe, there is a refugee crisis with people fleeing in desperation from war torn countries, taking their chances in overcrowded boats. Images of desperate people, bombed homes, and famine-stricken bodies appear on my television screen. I see a small child lying on the beach, so loved by children as a place to run and build sand castles, paddle and swim. He lies in his red top and navy trousers, motionless, his dark head to one side, with the water lapping around him. Later, his limp body is gently carried by a rescuer, his tiny arms and legs dangling. There is one set of footprints in the sand, those of the man, and I think of the poem about the single set of footprints being those of Jesus carrying the afflicted. A toddler, another body among many other bodies of children and adults, desperate people, washed up on the shore like driftwood. They took their chances with the wild unpredictable power of the sea in overcrowded boats, sometimes in drifting dinghies, and lost the gamble, paid with their lives. No warm cosy beds, no lullabies and gentle sounds lulling these children to sleep. And I cannot help thinking of the ‘coffin ships’ taking the starving and the poor from famine-stricken Ireland to Liverpool and New York, and the many men, women and children including my ancestors who died on the way. In Liverpool, there is a plaque to Irish Famine victims who flooded into the city at that awful time. Beneath a car park are the bodies of hundreds of Irish people who died in the local workhouse. That influx of Irish refugees was met with a hostile reaction and the authorities sent many of them back to Ireland; to the hunger, typhoid and cholera. Accounts in newspapers and government documents of the time make chilling reading and echo contemporary attitudes. When I hear the vitriol directed at today’s migrants, I cannot but feel sad, angry and connected to these refugees and exiles. As an Irish emigrant, some things set me apart and make me distinctly Irish but I understand emigrants from other countries, for our stories are similar. Only the names and the colour of the skin have changed.
Life as an Irish immigrant became easier during the 1990s and into the 2000s with the growing popularity of Irish theme pubs and the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. Anti-Irish feeling and stereotypes faded away but sadly such attitudes rarely disappear completely. The perennial Irish stereotype of the ‘Thick Mick’ and the Irish joke are still around. Even people who genuinely wanted to get to know me used them as ice breakers and didn’t seem to see the irony and insult of telling an Irish joke to an Irish person. For some, encountering a blonde Irish woman often proved too good an opportunity to miss and what ensued was often a heady cocktail of racist and sexist comments.
I am now rooted in my adopted environment but that initial cut has left a permanent wound that when prodded by sights, or memories, quietly weeps. I stand on the summit of a mountain and have a 360-degree panoramic view of the Lake District. Opposite, the Scafell massif rises to its pinnacle as the highest peak in England and below, Wastwater, the deepest lake in the country empties out to run to the Irish Sea. I look beyond the dome of Sellafield to the line of coast in the far distance and see the hazy outline of the Irish coast, the land of my birth. I stand surveying the physical landscape and the landscape of my life.
I, like thousands of other Irish immigrants and those from many lands have contributed much to our adopted country. We have been servants, labourers, construction workers, miners, carers, and professionals from different disciplines, and all have helped in keeping the wheels of the British economy and society turning. We have contributed our labour and skills and some paid with their lives like my great-grand-father who worked and died in the steel works of the North East. My grandfather worked on the Liverpool Docks in the early decade of the last century. My Irish-born grand-uncle tended the wounded and dying as a medic on the fields of France during WW1. My mother, second generation Irish, was a nurse in the NHS from its inception and her brother, my uncle, was a WW2 bomber pilot.
To be a nurse is a privilege for we witness so much about life, death and being human. It’s a cliché but nevertheless true; we are all born, we laugh, cry, suffer, rejoice, bleed, and we all die. As a nurse and an immigrant, I have learnt there is no ‘other’, no ‘not me’, just human beings and every human life is of equal value. Creating distinctions narrows us down, creates fear and problems, smothers our positive human qualities, our humanity and compassion. It would be a happier and safer world if we remembered that despite our different backgrounds and ethnicity, we are connected by our shared humanity.
So, I stand on an island looking towards the island on which I was born but I am not an island. I was born into my family unit and into my national family and I am immensely proud of both but there is a larger family beyond them to which I equally belong. Being part of one national family does not, should not, cut us off from the rest of the human community. That has been the lesson of my experiences as an immigrant. When empathy and compassion die and are replaced by judgemental attitudes and victim-blaming we have arrived on a dangerous shore.
I peer through the haze trying to getting a clearer view of my native land but I cannot see it just as I cannot see into the future. I can only see shapes emerging here and there. So, it is with my continuing experience as an Irish immigrant. There is a dark cloud in the form of Brexit hanging over the relative brighter days of trust and acceptance that became familiar to Irish immigrants. Shadows are emerging, striking out, attacking Irish people physically and verbally and I hear some of the old rhetoric in the street and on the TV screen from politicians. I am frightened and sad. We are going around in circles and meeting ourselves again. But I refuse to despair at the anti-Irish feeling that is beginning to resurface. I trust there are enough people who believe in the perennial philosophy of love thy neighbour. After forty years, I have learnt that lesson, the haters are few in comparison to those who accepted and embraced me.
So, I will continue to keep the Irish Christmas Eve night tradition of placing a lit candle in the window as a welcoming beacon to those in need of shelter. It is symbolic of welcome, warmth, and love, the qualities that make us human. I look out over the expanse of land and sea and something I learned at school comes into my head.
‘Who is my neighbour?’ ‘My neighbour is all mankind.’
Kathy Mairs is an Irish immigrant living in England. A Registered Nurse and Social Sciences graduate, she has worked in the NHS, charity sector, and third level education. She believes that equality is only achievable when social justice replaces self-interest as the driving force in our society. Kathy now has time to write and had an article published in Cumbria magazine.
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