In an early memory of mine, if it is a real memory, I was taken one smoky winter afternoon by my Uncle Tom to Rosslare Harbor, some 10 miles from our hometown of Wexford in the southeast corner of Ireland. It was the early 1950s, and I would have been 6 or 7 years old. At the harbor’s pier, the ferry to Britain was preparing to depart. Memory magnifies, and the vessel I recall is the size of an ocean liner, its sheer flank beetling over the dock, its mighty smokestacks puffing out great gray cumuli and its hooter shaking the air with its deep-throated bellowings.
The unlikeliness of this magnitude leads me to suspect that what I am entertaining is not a recollection of my own but a fragment of exaggerated folk-memory. For I see what seems an impossibly vast number of weeping mothers and ashen-faced fathers, bidding farewell to a host of young men, each one carrying a cheap suitcase, who are streaming on board the ship, bound for London, Birmingham, Coventry, to seek work in Britain’s postwar reconstruction drive.
Perhaps I am not deceived. Tens of thousands of young men and women did leave Ireland in those years. We had been neutral in the war, and therefore missed out on the largess of the Marshall Plan. Our economy was based almost entirely on agriculture, and many a desperate household subsisted on the few pounds or dollars sent home weekly by exiled sons and daughters.
Today, the Irish of my generation have a distinct sense of déjà vu. Tens of thousands have left Ireland in this year alone. The age of the Celtic Tiger, those fat years in the 1990s and early 2000s, the first period in our history when we knew what it was to be rich, has given way to a time of crashes, debts, austerity and, once again, emigration. There is hardly a person here who has not been affected. The hangover that the years of false plenty left us with is the worst we have ever suffered — the worst, but not the first. And if there was ever a people that knew how to handle a hangover, surely it is we.
Irish memory is long, and darkened by bitterness. The country has suffered repeated waves of emigration, much of it compulsory, ever since the Flight of the Earls at the beginning of the 17th century, when English forces defeated the army of the Irish aristocracy and drove its leaders into exile. After the disastrous uprising of 1798 and throughout the rebellious century that followed, thousands of what would nowadays be called freedom fighters were deported to the penal colonies of Australia. In the 1840s — the Black Forties, as the decade is called — Ireland’s population was disastrously reduced by famine and the mass departure of the starving and the destitute; the vessels that carried emigrants to America were known, with good reason, as coffin ships.
The violent poetry of leave-taking is ingrained in the Irish consciousness. I once read an account of a Black Forties parting between a young man setting out for America and his father. The two men stood face to face and, instead of speaking, danced their farewell, their stony gazes locked, while the womenfolk wept. A far cry from “Riverdance.”
Much has changed since then, of course. The young people leaving Ireland today are nothing like the pitch-capped rebels of ’98, the starvelings of the Black Forties or the youths with their suitcases on that 1950s ferry. They are well educated and, for the most part, middle class — I.T. operatives, engineers, construction workers, off in search of jobs no longer to be had here. In a depressingly neat variation, many are immigrants themselves — Polish masons, Czech electricians, Romanian plumbers — who came during the building bubble of the Celtic Tiger years and are now moving on to London to work on the construction of the Olympic Village.
In the old days, emigrants would in all probability never see their families again. One of the most heart-rending results of the mass departures of the 1950s are the aging, single and destitute Irishmen living friendless and lost to their families in that urban England, so much of which they helped to rebuild after the war. But now emigrants are less likely to forget, and be forgotten. Budget airline travel and communications technology mean they can return home from the far side of the world, even if only virtually, as often as they wish.
One of the biggest differences is that today Ireland is the Good Boy of Europe, a shining example of newfound fiscal rectitude when compared to what the more prudent northern European countries consider the irredeemably profligate Greeks, Portuguese, Spaniards and Italians. This is a novel position for us. It is as if the shiftless urchin who used to skulk and daydream in the back row has been summoned to the front of the class by President Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s latter-day Iron Chancellor to be presented with a medal and scroll.
Our most effective succor, however, may rest in what has not changed at all: our persistently grim cheerfulness. One could say, as some do, that we Irish are congenitally masochistic, that we secretly welcome misfortune. But it does not feel like that. Rather, we have always had a propensity to laugh at ourselves, which stands us in good stead in these melancholy times, when laughter, even the self-mocking kind, is at a premium.
Yet laughter cannot allay some memories. Here, from my sad store, is another. It is the sweltering summer of 1969, and I am living in London. Walking through Hyde Park one Sunday afternoon I hear, faintly, a familiar sound. At first I cannot identify it, then I do: it is the leathery smack of a hurley stick hitting a hurling ball. Hurling, along with Gaelic football, is the national game of Ireland; it is very fast, and highly skilled, but can look to the uninitiated eye like an all-out battle between two bands of nimble, swift and very angry warriors armed with wooden battle-axes. I stop, and scan the greensward, and see, in the distance, in a long glade between two rows of trees, a pair of young men in shirtsleeves, one at each extreme of the grassy ride, hitting a hurling ball to each other, over and over, from end to far end, and my heart is pierced by this image of yearning, of loneliness, by this quintessence of homesickness in the vast world of exile.
By John Banville, the author of The Sea and, most recently, The Infinities.