Sir, Fintan O'Toole praises the Irish descent playwright Martin McDonagh (April 26th) for not "playing up the accepted image of a child of the diaspora coming home", defined in terms of "the sound of lapping lakewater heard on a grey pavement. The long, long way from Clare to Cricklewood. Many young men of 20 growing old and still promising to take their Cathleens home again. The melancholy allure of a lost paradise, where the sweet sorrow of parting will one day be transformed into the joy of home coming."
Of course McDonagh doesn't define himself in those terms - they are the hallmark of the Irish in exile, not of those born abroad to Irish parents. Their ethnic aspirations were articulated by The Pogues, the Sex Pistols, Morrisey and Oasis. These and the predominant Irish football team were the first to assert their particular sense of Irishness.
It is true that these and other often tacky and pathetic out pourings characterise much of what emanated from the Irish abroad in the past, but it may well be, as J. A. observed in The Irish in Britain. (London, 1964), that they have been reluctantly adopted as the only available articulations of feelings too inchoate and abstruse to be otherwise expressed. I'll take you home again Kathleen was written for the American music hall around 1900 by a German; Many Young Men of Twenty is J.B. Keane's detached commentary on emigration from the safe haven of Listowel; and From Clare to Here was written in the Seventies by an English folk singer (Ralph MacTell) inspired by the "Ryanair Generation" of Irish building workers earning pots of money and able to go home on a whim at a moment's notice.
Bearing in mind that 82 per cent of Irish emigrants to Britain in 1961 left school (and in many cases left home) before the age of fifteen, and that as late as 1926 61 per cent of Ireland's population lived outside towns and villages, it becomes easier to understand why the dominant theme is one of loss; loss of family, of community, of cultural context and, therefore, of purpose. They feel betrayed by the society which failed them, by the beliefs (religious and political) which conditioned them, by the dreams which eluded them.
Is it too much to ask that we - the Irish whose comfort, status, and prosperity were enhanced by every emigrant who went elsewhere - refrain from ridiculing them? After all it was, I think, Oscar Wilde who remarked that "The road to Tara leads through Holyhead", and his father, Sir William Wilde, who described those Irish who remained here after the postFamine exodus as, "The poor, the weak, the old, the lame, the sick, the blind, the dumb, the imbecile and the insane"! Make's defining true "Irishness" a little trickier now, doesn't it? - Yours, etc.,
Church Hill,
Wicklow,
Co Wicklow.