Living away from Ireland is easier. There, I've said it, and the sky hasn't come crashing down, and the crowd at home probably don't mind. So much of the old longing and rawness is long gone. After more than three decades away, my life in Australia is not necessarily better, but it's definitely easier.
Perhaps this sense of ease is because my sparse early life in Ireland was a tentative and even thwarted affair. After I sat the Leaving Cert (surely the oddest name for such a pivotal exam), there was the seminary, and in a somewhat more pragmatic state of mind, the pig farm in Kilkenny.
While the seasons slid by that year, I was busy power-hosing pens and feeding pigs and all the while imagining a new life abroad. By the time I got to Kilkenny, I was simply biding my time until I’d leave.
Cane and craic
For a land where the cane and craic were so prevalent, Ireland was grim enough of a place back in the 1980s. While my older sisters were singing along to Abba, the newly-crowned Eurovision winners, and The Bee Gees, my mother was listening rapt to Gay Byrne’s morning radio show. The news bulletins were full of the latest atrocities up in the North. But all the ferocious political rhetoric and all those ever so well-articulated condemnations by church leaders were making no difference.
At the seminary, the anguish of the Ulster lads at the spiral of killings and bombings was palpable. Even the house dean was making dire predictions about the conflict if Bernadette McAliskey did not survive the assassination attempt in January that year. This was way before the meaning of Good Friday would garner any new, positive, connotations. And when I got to Australia, I struggled to explain the Troubles to workmates and friends.
It takes time to let one’s adopted country into your heart. Even something as simple as barracking for an Australian sports team doesn’t happen overnight. I remember living with an English family when I first arrived in Melbourne and their Australian-born children still supported the English cricket team during the Ashes. It struck me as being sad that such die-hard patriotism should be foisted onto the next generation.
Epiphany, of sorts
I had my own epiphany of sorts that night when Cathy Freeman won gold in the 400m at the Sydney Olympics: when I found myself suddenly up out of the couch and yelling my encouragement at the TV screen as Australia's most famous indigenous track and field athlete romped home with metres to spare.
The process of letting go has to begin somewhere. In the long run, wearing too many fond memories of the old country on your sleeve doesn’t do anyone any favours. Seeing bumper stickers in Melbourne boasting Glasgow’s Miles Better, I always found bemusing and even faintly ridiculous. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of those who proclaim that some basic food items are superior in taste simply because they are manufactured in Ireland. This may sound petty, but often it is simply a slight on the cuisine of one’s new country. Though, of course, I hasten to add that my mother’s soda bread was in a league of its own.
With a raft of barriers in place now which deter long gone migrants such as myself from returning to Ireland, my decision to stay away is easier now. It’s much more than that anyway. I suspect, going back, the terrain would be too difficult to navigate and I’m not sure I have enough energy for such an undertaking.
Bunker down
It's time now to bunker down as another winter approaches here in Tasmania. Snow has already fallen on Hobart's Mount Wellington. It was so chilly this morning that for a nanosecond I imagined I was back in the middle of a bitingly cold Irish winter.
With Ireland always lurking somewhere in my mind, perhaps I’m mistaken about losing so much of my Irishness. Maybe this emigration caper is not so clear-cut after all and there’s more to it than some kind of an emotional index or economics.
Memories and reminders of our formative years are always lurking. It’s probably time I thought making that pilgrimage home again, soon. But it’s a long way back, and of course it’s not just the distance.
