Leeds Irish Health and Homes (LIHH) is an organisation serving the various needs of the city’s Irish community since 1996, under the headings of Care, Culture and Community. I have volunteered for culture projects over the years, offering poetry workshops and supporting the production of a series of small anthologies.
The first of these was The Trojan Donkey in 2020 and included work reflecting hostility the older generation of Irish immigrants to the UK experienced. Writing in An Phoblacht in 2022 under the title Anti-Irishness Has Never Really Gone Away in Britain, Joe Dwyer quoted a group poem from The Trojan Donkey:
... l know your streets
aren’t paved with gold
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because l laid them,
come rain or cold,
your M1s
and your M62s,
reading your B&B cards:
No Blacks, Irish or Jews.
I am the slighted Irish
minding your sick,
teaching your children.
You called me thick ...
It should be stressed that many of the Irish immigrants I spoke with had experienced only welcome in the UK. Others recalled abuse and harassment – apparently, a common prank in Leeds (according to the renowned fiddler Des Hurley, another LIHH volunteer) was for an Irish name to be selected at random from the phone book and the victim called and subjected to racist abuse. It would have been dishonest to ignore those negative views expressed in workshops and conversations I had in the community. As with so many aspects of these islands’ history, an uncomfortable or unflattering episode can quickly be forgotten by one side and I was pleased that a new project would allow us to take a longer view of our difficult relationships.
We are now preparing The Holdings for a May Day launch, our new anthology of LIHH poetry. The Holdings responded to an approach from the Leeds Museums, who offered for workshops I would lead access to their 19th-century holdings which included material that would put the above debate into a historical context, while warning us that we might find some of it offensive, especially the cartoons. These routinely depicted the Irish as simian-featured hooligans – a word itself derived from the surname of a violent Irish family in a music-hall song – drafting a caricature that would be redeployed elsewhere against people of colour.
The monochrome lithograph, Christmas Time, The Political Mummers, mocks Daniel O’Connell, who campaigned against slavery as well as for Catholic emancipation. It reminded me of Princess Margaret’s defence of her comment about “Irish pigs” as actually a reference to “Irish jigs”, which made no sense whatsoever. Real Irish pigs make their appearance in these cartoons as they do in Engels’ less-enlightened writing about the Irish in The Condition of the Working Class in England: “The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill.”
Actual contact with an Orange sash upset one workshop member, but without leading her to express hostility to such traditions – I should mention the continued existence of Leeds Orange Lodge LOL 81 in case it is thought we have no awareness of that institution over here (I noticed it often meets in a South Leeds pub called The Plantation, which I feel evidences a certain a sense of humour among the Brethren, alluding to how many of their ancestors came to Ulster in the first place).
I was inspired by, among other things, an Irish rioter’s life preserver (cosh), which probably says very bad things about me, but which did lead me on interesting digressions about seanbhata and bataireacht, the arts of traditional Irish stick fighting – and to Seanie Barron’s stick art, a hedge carpenter of genius whose work has been the subject of an in-depth essay by Jon Wood, a curator at Leeds’ Henry Moore Institute.
A closer connection between Irish and Arab cultures might be in this area, considering Usama ibn Munqidh’s the Kitab al-’Asa, or Book of the Staff, a poetry anthology of work celebrating famous walking sticks and other staffs – a modern international version would surely include Seamus Heaney’s The Ash Plant and maybe his New Year’s Haiku: “Dangerous Pavements. / But I face the ice this year / With my father’s walking stick.”
Among our anthology poems, Bronagh Daly notes that the incomer Campbells to her Irish home had a “planter’s name” which means “crooked mouth”, while Keith Fenton’s poem title You’re Allowed In The Engine Room And Nowhere Else, 1916 in itself suggests the role envisaged for the Irish in the British Empire.
Natalie Hughes-Crean’s more domestic recollections include her father’s use of Swarfega with its distinctive smell; Laura MacDonagh’s In Transit points up her status between nations, and connects with the sentiments of John McGoldrick’s lines “Passage stones / Bleed the feet”; Carol Wright researched an ancestor from the time we were studying who had enlisted in the British Army, the engine room of Empire: “Ramshackle soldier in his stovepipe hat / Half a leg missing for the English shilling” like some Leeds version of Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye. Treasa Ni Drisceoil weaves a magical web of youthful memories of Ireland as do Alison Bohan’s poems, though hers have a bittersweet pattern of being sent away in her childhood. The others display consistently original takes on what risked being a hackneyed theme.
I enclose below two of three anthology poems I want to use in their entirety that I feel are valuable both in themselves but also in the relevance of the themes they evoke. First, Laura McDonagh’s In Transit takes the name of the family van as symbolic of their new border-crossing emigrant status. Wittily, this is used to consider other borders, such as between girlhood and womanhood, life and death, faith and doubt. The prejudice of her mother against tinkers is certainly one I remember from my own childhood. Bigotry cuts both ways.
In Transit
That summer, we went home in a Transit. From transire, to cross
over, I knew from school. “They’ll think we’re tinkers!” Mam hissed,
but Dad didn’t care, crowing as we rolled off the ferry, “Smell that air!”
Barrelling through Ballygawley, Fivemiletown, Enniskillen with no seat belts,
hedgerows, wilder than in England, whipping past our metal wings.
Then over the border: a threshold to another set of rules.
The Transit took us everywhere that year: Enniscrone, the big Penneys,
Confession at Knock, dark pubs where old men supped pints,
slipped us punts, a barn where four pink-bellied pups writhed in a crate.
It took us to a wake, to a house with mirrors covered, clocks stopped,
a corpse with fingernails like polished stones, Charon on his way.
Summer almost gone, my skin erupted; a change of water deemed the culprit,
or puberty, perhaps. Mam knew what to do. The Transit took us
to Mayo, a blank-eyed bungalow and a woman with The Cure. She said to
close my eyes, open my mind, not to worry and to have a little faith.
She gave me a card of the Sacred Heart; Mam gave her £20. Fair exchange.
Then the Transit took us back across the water from where folklore felt like more,
where there was only a membrane between worlds, not even skin-deep.
The Sound of Your Voice by Nicola Carr, a native Irish speaker, is an unabashedly direct love poem that recalled for me The Lament for Art O’Leary by Eileen O’Connell, Daniel’s aunt. Carr’s language crosses its linguistic borders but in addition there is a moment of poetic border-crossing synaesthesia in the third tercet (immediately after what may or may not be a roguish joke). However, the importance of voices and the poem’s last line in Irish, top and tail a love poem in a language used with the slightly-formal manner of a guest.
The Sound of Your Voice
It was the sound of your voice that made me fall in love with you –
money and possessions were irrelevant. When I asked you to marry me,
and you said yes, it was the happiest day of my life. I had been searching
for years to meet such a travelling companion and was so pleased when
I found you. I thank God for the memories we have shared so far –
like the time I left the Blackpool rock in the slot machine by accident ...
I thank you most of all for always being there to listen and for expressing
a keen interest in my friends. You are like a flower and your scent echoes
love and you have helped me to grow and become the person I am today,
mo anam chara go raibh maith agat.
Facing up to historical abuse can only help in the long run. In this country, a process has even got under way whereby the British Empire is seen as not simply the nation being welcomed into less industrially-developed countries with its invaluable gifts of Christianity, infrastructure and railway systems.
Leeds has owned the stain that the persecution of David Oluwale to his death by two of its police officers left on the city; naming a new bridge after David was a deeply symbolic act and LIHH itself has been active for the David Oluwale Memorial Association and recently in tracing survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries who moved to the UK.
There have been a number of studies into intergenerational trauma among Irish emigrants and their children which have been helpful in understanding the damage, often invisible, that it has caused over the years. Projects like The Holdings are beneficial in allowing members of newer urban communities to understand what their antecedents endured, and hosts to understand a lingering truculence and ingratitude they may sense from them sometimes, or from newer communities still, some the descendants of slaves. It is also a kinder device for drawing people’s attention to historical shortcomings in their hospitality than a cosh.
Workshop members looked through Leeds Museums’ examples of prejudice to connect with experiences of these earlier migrants from Ireland and perhaps understand what fears their parents and forebears might have had when moving to Britain.
In fact, The Holdings anthology poems are much gentler in tone than might have been expected: workshop members looked through Leeds Museums’ examples of prejudice to connect with experiences of these earlier migrants from Ireland and perhaps understand what fears their parents and forebears might have had when moving to Britain. In this way, they were better prepared for their reception than, say, the Windrush generation who were shocked at their own, especially given how the UK courted workers from the Commonwealth after the second World War.
I certainly believe it was important to talk about these experiences and it was interesting that it led Mary Clark to write her poem following:
Family Secrets
What’s the harm?
Everybody has family secrets.
It is nobody else’s business..
Keep it within the family circle.
Fair enough, but then I became the family secret.
Divorced, living in England, single parent to two young boys.
The relatives felt awkward ...
Best not to mention it.
The neighbours and the town were kept in the dark.
A priest said, “Divorced, it will not do –
If people knew I was a friend of yours!”
What had I done to feel shame?
Why did I have to take the blame?
There was a freer area across the water:
Time to get on with my life.
There are things that attract more blame than divorce:
Think of the babies denied their mothers,
Brought up in an institution
Or taking a chance on adoption or fostering.
Think of the mothers and the ache in their arms and their hearts.
Then there were sons and daughters
Who knew they were too different to stay,
Sought a new place with freedom to be themselves
Or they stayed and withdrew from life.
Maybe even ended it all.
All because it ‘wouldn’t do’.
A reputation was at stake.
Consider our standing in the community!
But consider more strongly,
Fewer secrets: less harm.
That last line contains a profound truth linking David Oluwale’s experience of coming to this country from Nigeria and those from Ireland including Mary Clark and survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries: ‘Fewer secrets: less harm.”
“When you’ve written it down it doesn’t hurt any more” Jean Rhys observed and the Holdings approach was based on a similar ethos, a linguistic desensitising exercise to address intergenerational trauma through art. Such exercises are necessary for community as well as individual health, especially for the Irish and English communities in these islands and I was honoured to be involved in this one. I hope these words give their readers some sense of why we found it worthwhile, and why similar projects might prove valuable elsewhere. If you would like to discuss it with us, please get in touch.
The Holdings anthology from Leeds Irish Health and Homes is edited by Laura McDonagh and Ian Duhig. For copies or more information, email info@lihh.org
