When James Joyce was asked whether he would ever return to Dublin, he replied: “Have I ever left it?”
He would only live to the age of 58, dying in Zurich in 1941. Joyce is still considered one of the most important writers the 20th century produced and probably remains the best-known Irish writer. The image of his slicked-back hair and little round glasses are in themselves enough to evoke Joyce’s reputation as a literary behemoth. Ireland takes pride in him now that it never really took while he lived — he made us uncomfortable.
That is, you must admit, very “us” of us.
Ulysses was never banned in Ireland because it was never imported into the country for sale in the first place. Sure, we wouldn’t want to be reading dirty books anyway. Joyce’s relationship with Ireland was one of deep resentment and deep obsession. When he questioned whether he had ever left, it was because the country — and Dublin in particular — remained ubiquitous in his writing in the decades after his leaving in his early 1920s. He described himself as having been “exiled”. Pushed out by the Irish tendency toward what he considered parochialism, the religious stranglehold of the Church and the impossibility of criticising the country on the page — as he so frequently and excoriatingly did — from within.
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It is so like us (Irish people generally) to leave without leaving. We’ve made an art of the necessity of emigration since the 1840s, but we’ve also made an art of leaning back toward home with reverence and revulsion, reluctance and yearning. Joyce was the most eloquent Irish emigrant to feel the pain of unrequited love for Ireland, but most of us appear to feel something along those lines in some respect or other.
A combination of idolising home and spurned irritation at having felt pushed out — those leaving Ireland at the moment are not solely responding to the pull of elsewhere. That pull clutches us from the feeling of being repelled from home.
Most people aren’t James Joyce. We only had one of those and we neglected to send an Irish State representative to his funeral. The rest of us are just looking at Ireland and wondering if it would make space for us if we ever did decide to return. There are 26 rental properties available in my native Limerick city at the time of writing. The cheapest one is €1,600 a month. It’s a studio flat whose windows look directly out on to a high wall with thick black cables running along its length. There’s a chest of drawers pushed up against the back of the couch like a console table, presumably so you can reach back and grab yourself a pair of clean underpants while cooking your dinner.
Emigrants love Ireland in the way you can love a parent more when you don’t live under their roof
Why not? Nobody can see in, what with the wall right outside the window. Live a little.
Emigrating is one of those life-changing experiences that represent a change from which you can never return. If you’re an Irish person, you can return to Ireland from the UK, US or Australia, or from another country where a pocket of the diaspora has settled and made a new life for itself. The leaving, though, you can’t undo. Ireland will change in your absence and in some ways, it will resent your going. Your claim to Irish identity may feel even stronger from a distance — that happens when you leave home and you must carry your Irishness into every interaction with people — but those still at home may view your investment in Ireland from afar as performative or even a form of appropriation.
It’s well for you listening to Paul Brady in Sydney in 30-degree heat, but if you’re not scraping sleet from your windshield in the dark of a winter morning, are you one of us?
You can go, but don’t pick up any weird ideas and bring them back with you. Don’t mention the fact that big tech firms would leave Ireland faster than you could mutter, “I have a degree in computer science” if we did tax them in the way many Irish people suggest we should and for that reason perhaps it isn’t useful to consider how much more they’d contribute to our economy if we took a harder stance on taxation. They’re not in Ireland for our charm (charming as we are) or because we know our way around an Excel spreadsheet.
Don’t suggest that for the property crisis at home to settle into a mere problem, we might need to think differently. We might need to consider the way intense scarcity of housing the Irish Government has no serious plan to tackle accelerating rental and purchase prices, who that benefits (and who it hits hardest). Whatever you do, don’t ask why Ireland’s tiny Jewish community is smaller now than it was in 2016. Also, don’t come home for a visit wearing anything unusual. That’s notions. Are those aviator sunglasses? Your old school friends will call you Top Gun every time you saunter into the local pub for the next 30 years.
Emigrants love Ireland in the way you can love a parent more when you don’t live under their roof. When we return we can feel slightly wounded by the fact that we don’t always slot back in the way we hoped. There’s only one James Joyce, with his dirty books, weird politics and (probably) storing cups lip-down in the kitchen cupboard like a Protestant.
Every emigrant, though, has a little of Joyce in them. The longing for home, and the awareness of why some people leave. Home is complex and that’s not just true of Ireland.
