“Home is not Ireland, home is here for me; I go back as a tourist and I love the scenery, but I’m not a displaced Irish woman,” Patricia Lyons says from her apartment in Santo Domingo.
Outside, the regular beep of horns and sound of bumper-to-bumper traffic from the streets of the Dominican Republic’s capital during the morning rush hour are audible as the Dublin native speaks.
The Caribbean country takes up two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola that it shares with Haiti. Ties between the Dominican Republic and Ireland are few, with one 2010 UN estimate putting at less than 100 the Irish-born population living amid the nation of 11 million. The closest embassy for Irish people is in Colombia, a two-and-a-half hour flight away.
In many ways, Lyons credits this lack of an Irish expat community as the reason for her strong integration into the country she has called home for 40 years.
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Lyons had moved across the globe from Paris in 1985 with her then-husband, a Dominican Republic native, the son of a political exile.
“Nobody had heard of Ireland, it was amazing,” she says, adding that people would think she had mentioned “Holland” as her home country. “Even quite educated people would have no contact with Ireland or Irish people.” She would then have to explain Ireland was in fact an island beside England.
Despite working as a teacher of English literature in a bilingual school for many years, Lyons says she only met one other Irish person while in international schools. Tourism to the country’s resorts and white sand beaches has, however, become a major industry in recent decades. Lyons says more Irish are travelling there on packages. Tourist numbers are up nine-fold overall over the past 40 years.
In 1985, Dominican Republic was “very much a developing country – the first months, I didn’t think I’d make it really”, Lyons says.
“There were power cuts for 20 hours a day; it was terrible having the whole city in darkness, the heat, no fans, and the mosquitos,” she says. Early on, the water cut out while she was having a shower, and her mother-in-law told her to “get used to it”.
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Lyons had been living with her family in Raheny, Dublin, before leaving aged 19 in 1977. “I felt I had to get out,” she says. Ireland was “very stifling”, especially for young women, and many of her peers were getting engaged and having babies by 21. But Lyons had a sense of adventure. “I knew instinctively there was another life out there for me.”
With fluent French and a secretarial course under her belt, she found a job in Paris. Her mother, a well-educated woman and a housewife of the 1950s, had “always said to us, the world is your oyster”.
Lyons’s eight years in Paris brought a “real education”, she says. She met the children of Latin American political exiles, many of them students in the Sorbonne.
“Learning about revolution and geopolitics, I found it all fascinating. I was very green and ignorant leaving Ireland. Anything left-wing or anti-establishment didn’t make it to Ireland.”
There was a “whole air of freedom” in Paris, says Lyons. This was dampened initially in the Dominican Republic, where “at the time, there was a set code for women”.
She says a macho culture at the time saw the man who would become her first husband begin to change – going out to political meetings with his father and uncles. “I was left at home feeling angry and frustrated.”
But in the 1990s, divorce rates rose and more women entered the workplace. Women didn’t “have to put up with it any more”, she says.
What “saved her” was securing a live-in job which she loved at an international hotel resort.
When Lyons divorced her husband, aged 30, she was at a crossroads. It was her “tribe” of Dominican women friends that kept her in the country. Having such close friendships ties in with the praise she lavishes upon the Dominican people for their warmth.
“They welcome you with open arms. It’s a very inclusive society,” she says, where people “will invite you to dinner in their homes with ease”.
Many of her women friends were college graduates who had studied abroad: “Intelligent young divorced Dominican women, against the status quo... I really fitted in.”
She later remarried, to a local man, and had two sons with this husband, since deceased.
So how are her children’s Irish links, growing up in a country so far removed? “They are bilingual, but their sense of Irish culture is not that strong, and culture is the strongest thing needed for that sense of identity.”
She notes how her two sisters living in Australia had the support of a “huge Irish community”, enjoying St Patrick’s Day and Irish people coming together at Christmas and Halloween. “My kids didn’t have that. I didn’t have that.” Santa Claus was one tradition she brought with her from Ireland.
Her children, she says, “missed out on the influence of Irish culture here”. They came to find out more about it on their own as young adults. “One of them adores Phil Lynott, and visits his grave in Sutton every time he goes to Dublin.”
“My sons were and are very much Dominican – in their way, the food they eat, the reaction, everything.”
Two years ago, aged 65, Lyons tested the waters of her affinity for the Dominican Republic, moving to Bilbao in northern Spain on her own for a year.
“I wanted to experience living in Europe again, to see if I wanted to start a new chapter there.” While she made a lot of friends and joined different groups there, she says, “I realised after six months this wasn’t home for me.”
“I even missed the chaos,” she says. “I really missed my friends and my tribe.
“One day I woke up at 3am in Bilbao and thought, ‘Who would I call, who would I ring [in an emergency]? Home is [Dominican Republic] for me.” Lyons returned to Santo Domingo after nine months. “I needed to do that to show myself that this is where I call home.”
- This article is part of a series following Irish people living abroad in remote areas or countries with small Irish-born populations. Would you like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad? You can use the form or email abroad@irishtimes.com
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