An Irish history lesson that must not be forgotten

IN HONG KONG, very early on Sunday mornings, some of the world's most expensive real estate is occupied, suddenly and totally, by an army of migrants. If you walk between the gigantic skyscrapers of the central business district, into squares like Chater Garden and Harcourt Garden, or through the covered walkways that link the endless blocks of shopping malls, you are struck by an extraordinary sight.

Tens of thousands of young women from the Philippines, working in Hong Kong as domestic maids, cover every available space. Sunday is their day oft, but very few of them have enough money to go anywhere. So they move in from the suburbs and take over the place. They transform a sterile, angular piece of the postmodern world into a giant sitting room.

They spread cardboard on the pavements and lie around. They bring stoves and cook elaborate meals. They bring ghetto blasters and teach each other to dance, so you have to weave around chorus lines of girls beating out complex rhythms on streets more used to the hurried steps of people rushing to make more money.

There are religious groups, lost in Bible study, or praising the Lord in exuberant hymns. There are language classes in which older women spell out English words for groups of young girls whose lips shape the words into images of determination and dignity. There are grooming sessions, women combing out each other's hair with a lingering luxuriance, or testing lipsticks with the concentration of scientists perfecting a miracle cure.

And, above all, there is an electric buzz of gossip. You can sense it in the air from a mile away, as persistent and pulsating as the hum of traffic noise that rises from the city during weekdays. If you ask them what they talk about they will tell you that this is the only time they get to bitch about their employers, to compare their tantrums and foibles, to get advice on dealing with problems, to pick up the shared experience of survival in a strange land.

From dawn to dusk, these gold-paved streets are theirs. And then, as the sun goes down, they disappear again on the ferries, the buses and the subway, scattering back to the isolation of their employers' houses in the suburbs. Like mermaids, who have surfaced for a short while to sun themselves on the rocks, they flick their tails and are submerged again in the invisibility of the migrant. The spaces they have occupied for a day are reclaimed by their rightful owners.

Watching all of this recently, I felt oddly and intensely Irish. You meet people in Hong Kong, both wealthy Chinese people and European expatriates, for whom the invasion of the Filipinas is a plague of locusts. What they see is a swarm of women descending on the streets and behaving inappropriately.

Nice people do not dance and pray on the pavement. They do not comb their hair in public. People going about their business should not have to weave through groups of women cooking dinner. The glass towers of multinational corporations, the cool spaces of modern architects, should not be sullied by such untidy presences.

BUT if you're Irish you see something entirely different. You see a hidden nation gathering itself. You see the miracle of the man spirit which can give a scattered tribe of isolated exiles a sense of belonging. You see the way people can carry a homeland in their heads. You see the comfort of being, even for a while, with those who see you as a human being rather than as a pair of hands.

John Berger writes in his book The Seventh Man that "so far as the economy of the metropolitan country is concerned, migrant workers are immortal: immortal because continually interchangeable. They are not born; they are not brought up; they do not age; they do not get tired; they do not die. They have a single function - to work. All other functions of their lives are the responsibility of the country they come from."

The economic migrant is seen, in others words, neither as a citizen nor a member of a community but merely as an abstract function of the labour market.

The Hong Kong Sunday gathering is a chance not to be immortal, not to be interchangeable; to be, instead, from a place and a family and a country. And if you're Irish, you know immediately what it's about. You know that the same kind of thing has happened for generations in Kilburn and Chicago, in Coventry and Boston.

Our migrants may not have been as bold and as open as the Filipinas. We may have had the luxury of cathedrals and halls, of pubs and Gaelic grounds. But we were, nevertheless, expressing exactly the same needs and desires. We, too, have felt, through the generations, the same urge to create in exile these microcosmic images of an absent nation.

Walking through Hong Kong that Sunday morning, I couldn't help wondering how long the natural sense of affinity with these exiles that being Irish gave to a white, relatively wealthy western man like me is going to survive. How long will it be before it will be more natural for an Irish person walking through Hong Kong on a Sunday to sympathise with the disgruntled natives than with the exiles? How soon after we become paid-up members of the inner circle of developed economies will we forget what we ought to have learned from history?

THE best description of Ireland's place in the world at the end of the 20th century is this description, not of the present, but of the past of the Irish community in New York, given by Ronald H. Bayer and Timothy J. Meagher in their 1996 book The New York Irish:

"Throughout their history in New York, the Irish have been at the border of the ins and outs, interpreting one to the other, mediating, sometimes including, sometimes excluding. They have been both victim and victimiser, `other' and definer of the `other', and, paradoxically, sometimes played both roles simultaneously."

What is history for the New York Irish of the past is today's news for the Irish Irish; balanced, in a global society, between the ins the outs, the victims and the victimisers. We are in a situation where we can see our history in one of two ways.

We can wallow in the self-pity of a martyred nation, which feels that it has paid its historical dues of suffering and displacement and therefore has no further responsibilities to discharge. Or we see it as a point of contact with others, an experience that allows us to place ourselves in a rapidly changing world. We can flee, in shame and fear, from our past and our ancestors. Or we can honour their memory by our sympathy for their equivalents in the contemporary world.