Time that Ireland remembered its forgotten Irish

Date Published: {J}

For a land which sent tens of millions of its forebears to the furthest corners of the globe, Ireland hasn’t exactly flocked to print with stories of emigration and life so far away from home.

Perhaps it’s because the story doesn’t have a happy ending for so many of those who left their native land, but given that we’ve sent a multiple of our own population to make their lives in other hands, you’d have thought that it would warrant closer scrutiny.

School gave us Dialann Deoraí – Diary of an Exile – Dónall Mac Amhlaigh’s wonderful account of his life as a brickie in London, and Rotha Mór an tSaoil (The Big Wheel of Life) which was Micí MacGabhann’s story of the Klondike Gold Rush. But text books are just fodder for rote learning, and you need to come back to them when there isn’t an exam on the horizon.

Frank McCourt followed up his Angela’s Ashes with ‘Tis, an insight into the life of an Irish teacher in New York – and now we have a new arrival with a story more familiar than any before to tens of thousands who went to work on the buildings across the Atlantic.

Niall O’Dowd is a man of many parts – peacemaker, publisher, editor, broadcaster – but to that list add painter and brickie, because that’s what we started out as when he left Ireland at the end of the seventies.

And his book An Irish Voice tells the story of the Irish who flocked to San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Boston the last time we had an economic downturn that left a generation without jobs at home.

For a man who put together the American team that laid the foundations for the Good Friday Agreement, you’d have imagined that his autobiography would be dominated by his place in history – and all of that is there for sure.

But the most enthralling part of an Irish Voice is the times he spent on the margins, looking for jobs from Irish gangers in pubs, sleeping on the floor, being bullied on the building sites, setting up his own painting business when he knew nothing more than which hand to hold a paint brush in.

I had the privilege of interviewing him on stage last weekend as part of the Galway Arts Festival and – apart from his unassuming, gentle nature – what came across was a man who wanted his book to somehow address this vacuum of writing on emigration and emigrants.

He talked of the generation known as the Aer Lingus painters – the ones without qualifications who were known disparagingly by the name of the airline of which they arrived – and how the Irish looked after each other.

He told the story of the 300 pound Kerryman who didn’t just give him a job but who insisted on his guest taking the marital bed – only to then relegate his own wife to the settee as he settled in for the night beside his guest to whom he sang Irish songs until his wife told him to shut up at six in the morning.

Niall O’Dowd didn’t set out with a plan – like so many he was brought out by a GAA club for the summer – but 32 years later he never came home. And luckily for him, he became legal along the way.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.