For 40 years the Irish Support Advice Service has helped to guide generations of struggling Irish through a maze of welfare and housing rules in London, writes MARK HENNESSYLondon Editor
LEAVING SPIDDAL, in Co Galway, in 1947, Barbara Naughton, whose only words of English were “yes”, “no” and “thank you”, was given some advice by an elderly neighbour as she headed for the boat: “Call every woman ‘madam’.” Today, a dignified, active and courtly woman, Naughton lives in sheltered housing in Shepherd’s Bush, in west London, thanks to the efforts of Mike McGing and his colleagues at the Irish Support Advice Service (Isas), which celebrates its 40th anniversary on June 14th.
The two first came into contact after Naughton had endured years of heartache living next to loutish neighbours, who played music so loudly in the flat downstairs that she was forced to buy a camp bed and sleep, fitfully, in her kitchen for six years. “The wife was always shouting at me, and they put up one of the speakers to the ceiling to make sure that I heard,” she says. “They didn’t like the fact that I was there at all. They seemed to think that the whole house was theirs.”
After she arrived in London, in 1947, Naughton spent eight years in service, working for a time for Prince Rainier of Monaco, then a single man enjoying London from a luxury flat on Grosvenor Square. “I didn’t have English, because we were all Irish speakers at home, but people took time to explain things to me, and I picked it up,” she says. “It was hard, though. But I enjoyed my time in service, I enjoyed it.”
Prince Rainier once asked her to take in a pair of trousers that no longer fitted. “I remember he gave me £10 for that. God, it was more than a week’s wages. A lovely man, he was, a lovely man,” she says, sitting in her beautifully kept one-bedroom flat.
Clearly fond of her, McGing, the son of Irish emigrants, is quietly passionate about the work done by a team of four full-timers and two part-timers, along with volunteers, from the Isas’s offices at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, on a £200,000 (€240,000) budget, which comes from the Ireland Fund of Great Britain and the Department of Foreign Affairs, among other sources.
“A lot of people come to us because they find it difficult to deal with authority, filling in forms, sorting through the bureaucracy,” he says. “Often they feel as if they get a bad response when they do ring them up. A lot of the services don’t understand the Irish community. A lot of the Irish feel daunted by all of it. They worked for 50 years. Sometimes they did so ‘on the lump’, but often we find people who are entitled to things but they just don’t know how to go about getting them.”
Besides helping with welfare and housing issues, Isas runs a network of social clubs, throughout west London and into Surrey, for the now ageing Irish emigrants of the 1950s and 1960s. “Dozens turn up to many of them. People get isolated in flats,” says McGing.
In Sutton, in Surrey, another Isas staff member, Frances Whelan, from Dún Laoghaire, visits Finbar Hayes in his flat. Hayes was a fireman once, in Bandon, Co Cork, before heading for the construction sites of the world. Cheerful despite experiencing more than his share of life’s problems, Hayes, who had his left leg amputated nearly two years ago, greets Whelan joyfully when she arrives. “Ah, it’s great to see you. Where would I be without this woman, where would I be?”
Hayes, who was once a foreman with O’Rourke, one of the biggest Irish building companies in London, stopped working six years ago because of a heart complaint. He was living in a “wet house”, for people with alcohol problems, but was desperate to move out, when Isas found him. “I got an introduction to Frances through a friend of mine. I was struggling a fair bit,” he says. “Only for her I wouldn’t have got anything. She looks after everything, and there is so much to cope with, I’m telling you the truth.”
Equipped with a prosthetic leg, Whelan uses his wheelchair to get to Sutton’s high street to meet a friend for breakfast “and a couple of pints”, though night-time excursions are a thing of the past since a mugging last year, when he was thrown from his chair.
Nearby, in Beddington, Whelan visits another on the Isas list, Agnes Young, who lives with her five-year-old son, Ryan, and three-year-old daughter, Annabel, in a local-authority house secured with the organisation’s aid. From Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, Young lost three brothers to suicide, the first when she was 11, the second eight years ago and the third three years ago, when she was pregnant with Annabel, in the same 24 hours that her mother also passed away.
Following the break-up of her marriage, she ended up squatting in a flat with Ryan, then aged two, and the baby Annabel, before she moved into emergency accommodation with the help of Isas. From there she was moved to more suitable accommodation, but she had to leave when the landlord wanted the property back. Struggling with some mental-health issues, she was moved to another property; it was deemed uninhabitable by a surveyor hired by Isas. The journey continued with two further moves, before she was eventually helped to find the home where she now lives, and from where she has begun to rebuild her life, studying for GCSE examinations and volunteering with Isas.
“Without Frances I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell. If it wasn’t for her we would not be here where we are now,” she says as Annabel delightedly shows off the family’s pet rabbits and Ryan holds up a new toy.
The family’s success clearly matters to Whelan. “People have to be able to take the stresses and strains of life. Some people fall at the first hurdle. Others don’t, and you can never tell what category each of us fits into until we are faced with those kinds of troubles ourselves. What Agnes has done so far is remarkable. She has turned her life around. She is a great mother, loves the kids. And she is one of our best volunteers,” says Whelan, who has given orations at the funerals of Irish emigrants when no one else was able to do so. “I have often walked away from places in tears. You’re not supposed to get involved, but you can’t help it. And there are still lots of people we haven’t got to yet. Sometimes we manage to pass on news of what we do at funerals.”
For McGing, Isas’s work matters, but it is not indefinite. “Most of the people we work with are the emigrants of old, not the younger people,” he says. “Time is catching up on them. In 15 or 20 years they will be gone. It is important that we help them while they need it.”
