I left EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin with burning eyes and ringing ears. The museum is located in Dublin’s docklands, in the vaults of an industrial building dating back to 1820, initially used as a bonded customs warehouse for tobacco and wine. It now houses a shopping mall. The museum underneath strikes me as a souped-up version of the corridor displays sometimes seen in airports that serve as a taster of the country you are about to enter – generally, exercises in banality. EPIC is dedicated to histories of the Irish diaspora and emigration from Ireland – clearly a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, it primarily consists of soundbytes and rapidly moving, ruthlessly edited film clips: sound and image bleeding and morphing in an infuriating fashion. Throughout the galleries, mawkish and pointless ‘interactivity’ (Guess the Outlaw!) is liberally scattered. It seems to have been designed for people with a concentration span of about three seconds and the ability to read no more than two sentences at a time. A whole room of fake ‘olde worlde’ book spines with titles by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora is par for the course.
Bookshelves of fake books with titles of books by authors from Ireland and the Irish diaspora. EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin.
One ‘byte’ that caught me was a snippet of a sentence from the writer Edna O’Brien: ‘There must be something secretly catastrophic about a country from which so many people go, escape…’ Manifestations of this sense of catastrophe is very evident on the streets of Dublin where, around every corner, there is a plaque or monument to fallen heroes, victims, martyrs, to those massacred or starved, impoverished, imprisoned, locked out, removed, shamed or otherwise driven from homes, workplaces or homelands. It is reminiscent of Freud’s image of the unconscious, in Civilization and its Discontents, as a Rome ‘in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones’.
Outside EPIC there is a memorial to the Great Irish Famine (1845- 1849), which commemorates the forced emigration of 1,490 tenants from Strokestown Park estate in Co. Roscommon (now the site of the National Famine Museum) during the summer of 1847. The tenants were forced to walk the 167km route along the Royal Canal to Dublin, where they boarded the open deck of a packet steamer to Liverpool. From there, they travelled on some of the worst of what became known as ‘coffin ships’. One of them was the Naomi, on which 196 out of 421 passengers died on the voyage from Liverpool to Quebec.
A pair of children’s shoes: detail from the Famine Memorial in Custom House Quay, Dublin. Commemorates the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849). Artist: Rowan Gillespie.Children’s shoes found in a famine graveyard near the Erne Hospital in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. On display at the Cavan County Museum, Ballyjamesduff.
Reversing the course of this 1847 eviction, since 2017 a hotel in the remote town of Ballaghaderreen in Co. Roscommon gave asylum to around 334 Syrians fleeing war-stricken homelands (though the contract with the former Abbyfield Hotel expires in December 2019). This accommodation was one of a number of Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres (EROC) across Ireland providing sanctuary during the height of the recent mass migration of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.
Latter day ‘coffin ships’, particularly those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, are well documented. Since 1993, a group called United for Intercultural Action has been compiling a list of ‘documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of “Fortress Europe” ‘ (here), which numbered 36,570 as of 1 April 2019 (though there would be many more undocumented). Earlier this week there were reports of migrants jumping off an overcrowded Spanish rescue ship and trying to swim to Lampedusa. By that stage, the Proactiva Open Arms ship had been refused entry by Italy for over three weeks since far right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has taken a hard line on migration and is attempting to close Lampedusa to migrant rescue ships.
Meanwhile back in the province of Ulster, following the revelations of the leaked ‘Yellowhammer’ report, a suspected bomb was reported near the border of Co. Fermanagh and Co. Cavan close to the Cavan to Clones road. When PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) officers attended the scene, a bomb exploded nearby, leading police to believe that they had been lured to the spot by dissidents attempting to murder PSNI officers. I overheard someone in Cavan say: ‘Any excuse, they’ll come out of the woodwork’. It is a common sentiment amongst borderland locals fearful of renewed sectarian violence if the border is fortified following Brexit. (Undoubtedly, the incident would have brought unpleasant memories to many older locals of the bombing in the border town Belturbet in Co. Cavan on 28 December 1972. Two teenagers, Geraldine O’Reilly (aged 15) and Paddy Stanley (aged 16) lost their lives. Eight others were seriously injured. Both of the youngsters were on Christmas holidays from school. Geraldine was waiting for her order in a local chip shop when the bomb hit. Paddy was calling his parents from a public phone box when he lost his life. Across the border in Co. Monaghan, another bomb had been detonated earlier in the day, seriously injuring two men. A third bomb exploded outside a pub at Mullnagoad, near Pettigo, in Co. Donegal. Nobody claimed responsibility for the Belturbet attack, but it was thought to be the work of loyalist paramilitaries.)
These are just two recent examples that suggest how ‘border thinking’ (Walter Mignolo) tempers the way the contemporary world is perceived, performed and produced. The complex interplay between borders, as well as frontiers like the Mediterranean, represent multiple ranges of register: bridge – dividing line, porous – watertight, soft – hard, unauthorised – authorised, invisible – visible, no-man’s land – demarcation zone, etc. Rather than being marginal, borders are increasingly key nodes for understanding the contemporary political landscape. According to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their book Border as Method, ‘borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space for contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism’.
For some years, I have been thinking about how concepts linked to hospitality may be a useful way of thinking through such negotiable and contested spaces. The point of departure was Jacques Derrida’s political analyses, in a sequence of seminars from the late 1990s,[1] in which he reads ‘hospitality’ as an aporetic space between the principles of unconditional or absolute hospitality – the principle of allowing whomever or whatever enters one’s domain without reservations or calculations – and conditional hospitality – the laws required to control and protect ‘home.’ Rather than setting these principles of hospitality as mutually exclusive forces, Derrida argues for an irreducible relation between the two.
Derrida understood ‘hospitality’ as an interrogative term to consider both public space as a bounded zone, in which the stranger/foreigner (étranger) is subject to the codes, rules and regulations of its host (home, city or state), and the common right of any stranger to any space; that is, the ethical imperative that the host receives whatever and whomever enters its domain. The radical basis of Derrida’s interpretation calls for the hyperbolic, unlimited ethics of (unconditional) hospitality to orient the (conditional) realm of legislation operating between hosts and guests, challenging the more conventional situation in which the unconditional is contained or guarded by the precepts of conditional hospitality. Radically re-orienting the conditional identity of hospitality, which Derrida summarises as the requirements for ‘a police inquisition, a registration of information, or a straightforward frontier control,’ invokes threshold politics as an ‘unstable place of strategy and decision.’ This, Derrida writes, is ‘[a] difference both subtle and fundamental, a question that arises on the threshold of “home,” and on the threshold between two inflections.’ For Derrida, this is an absolute principle: ‘An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it.’[2]
[1] Key publications related to this topic include: Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Adieu to Emmanual Levinas, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999); On Cosmopolitanism and Foregiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[2] Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 66-7.
I was sheltering from the rain in a pub in Virginia, Co. Cavan, waiting for the 11:36 bus to Ballyjamesduff. To be precise, the pub was part of a double-barrelled business under the ownership of a James Matthews – Lounge Bar and Funeral Directors. I would guess they have a monopoly on wakes in the area. This hostelry-cum-final resting place was a fitting symbol for the transition between life and death – an emotional and physical borderland that strongly resonated since I had recently returned from a long journey to Christchurch, New Zealand, to experience the last few days of my mother’s life and departing, aged 90. As a staunch Catholic, she had already received Supreme Unction – a ritual designed to connect the body to a spiritual realm – by the time I got to her bedside. As Rosemary Hill eloquently puts it, ‘Supreme Unction at the approach of death involves anointing the portals between the body and the material world – the eyes, nose, lips, ears and hands – to mark the end of the senses’ dealings with the things of the earth.’ (‘Was Plato too Fat? LRB, 10 October 2019, p.35). My mother’s death was precipitated by an inability to swallow, the beginnings (or endings) of a slow starvation, due to cancer of the oesophagus. The threshold condition of the ‘James Matthews’ also stood for the final shift in state signalled by the inability to drink, to swallow – the transitional drift from the pub lounge to the funeral parlour, to last rites and ashes, from the corporeal to a realm beyond (at least according to the Catholic ritual).
Of course, my mother did not willingly succumb to the sacrifice of starvation as did the republican hunger strikers of the Long Kesh and other Northern Irish prisons in the early 1980s. The most famous of the ten men who starved themselves to death in Long Kesh in 1981, protesting against the removal of Special Category Status for political prisoners, was Bobby Sands, who died on 5 May 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike, aged 27. The diary entry he wrote to launch his fasting reads: ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.’ As South African journalist David Beresford recounts in his book on these events, Ten Dead Men, the 1981 hunger strikes hark back in Irish history to the practice as used by early twentieth-century republicans during the flashpoint of the Anglo-Irish conflict at the time. Prominent amongst these was the poet, playwright and philosopher Terence MacSwiney – the Lord Mayor of Cork and commanding officer of the local brigade of the IRA – who was captured by British Troops and sentenced to two years’ jail for sedition. Protesting that the British had no jurisdiction in Ireland, MacSwiney immediately went on hunger strike and died in Brixton prison on his seventy-fourth day without food. MacSwiney wrote a famous line often quoted on murals in the Bogside and the Falls: ‘…the contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance, but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.’
Beresford refers to W. B. Yeats’ 1903 play The King’s Threshold, in which the poet Seanchan goes on hunger-strike against the king Guaire. The play weaves a narrative around the ancient history of the hunger strike in Ireland as a weapon to protest grievances:
KING: …He has chosen death:
Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bring
Disgrace upon me; for there is a custom, that if a man
Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve
Upon another’s threshold till he die,
The Common People, for all time to come,
Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,
Even though it be the King’s.
The King’s Threshold, by W. B. Yeats
Both Troscadh (fasting on or against a person) or Cealachan (achieving justice by starvation) are recorded in the Senchus Mór – the ancient civil code of pre-Christian Ireland. The legal tract specified circumstances of the action of a complainant fasting on the doorstep of the defendant with the aim of recovering a debt or objecting to a perceived injustice. The defendant, who was also obliged to fast, was disgraced if he did not submit to the procedure and pay (or pledge to pay) the debt. If the fast ended in death, Beresford writes, the defendant ‘was held responsible for [the complainant’s] death and had to pay compensation to his family. It is probable that such fasting had particular moral force at the time because of the honour attached to hospitality and the dishonour of having a person starving outside one’s house.’ (Ten Dead Men, London: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 15)
This speculative link between honour and hospitality – or the dishonour of allowing someone to die on the threshold of your home – offers a pointed take on the treatment of stateless human beings fleeing war and persecution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2012, among some 300 other fasting detainees, the Iranian asylum seeker Omid Sorousheh carried out a hunger strike for 50 days on the island of Nauru, the remote site used by the Australian government for the ‘offshore processing’ (double-speak for indefinite detention) of people seeking asylum, protection, resettlement and, ultimately, liberty – in wider ethical terms, hospitality. The Australian government preside over a policy of inhospitality, designing the camps as dumping grounds or deterrents, according to a Guardian report, ‘to discourage anybody from seeking sanctuary in Australia by boat.’ Close to death, Sorousheh was air-lifted to Brisbane for treatment. As soon as he was deemed fit for travel, the Australian Department of Immigration returned him to the Nauru detention centre. Back to the scarcely human, inhospitable, dishonourable, ‘threshold of another trembling world’, having been barred from crossing another threshold into a home that might offer a place in the world. Closer to these shores, on 23rd October 39 Vietnamese people, including 10 teenagers, were found dead in the back of a truck parked in an industrial park in Essex, having been shunted across borders from Vietnam, Bulgaria, Belgium and onwards. And, in an action that Una Mullally calls ‘abhorrent and pathetic’, four Fine Gael MEPs voted to block a European Parliament resolution to try to stop migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. An appalled Fintan O’Toole, who reminds readers of Ireland’s extensive history of post-Famine economic migrants, comments that:
We know them. They are our grandparents and aunts and uncles. They are not commodities to be trafficked or spectres to frighten voters with. They do work that needs to be done. They have names and lives and families and the same desire for decency and dignity as we have. They are us and, if we let them die so casually, we kill something in ourselves.
Before her father (a Matthews, or ‘the’ Matthews perhaps?) bundled her away, a wee girl showed me her ‘list’. ‘I’m doing my list’ she told me. The impulse to produce lists is understandable given the business of administration that the girl (of no more than four or five years old) no doubt espies on a daily basis – inventories, purchases, totting up takings etc. The list comprised a freeform cloud of doodles and squiggles. I asked about the most coherent of these – an upside-down spiral with a line running through it. She told me it was a bottle. ‘Is it a particular bottle?’ I asked, thinking she may have copied the symbol from a label on one of the bottles behind the bar. ‘No’, she forbearingly explained: ‘It is all bottles. Every bottle.’ It was a shadow image on Plato’s cave. Or an archetype. This clumsy adult had failed to access the primitive unconscious at play in the formation of this list. A very human impulse, a seed in the soul of an Irish girl to make sense of her world. A seed in the spirit of a line from the 1992 story ‘Time and Tide’ by Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, in which the protagonist, Nell, a book editor, gives some advice to a would-be writer, Millie: ‘The seed is within yourself. “How?” I hear you ask. Simple. The sperms are the moonbeams and sunbeams and shadows of every thought, half thought, and follicle of feeling that have attended you since your first breath of hardship. Think only of big things, Millie, big sad, lonely, glorious, archetypal things.’
Recorded in my notebook: ‘All the bottles.’
The girl in the pub is, of course, right to begin her study of symbology early. Ireland is steeped in symbols and signs, and there was a time not so long ago, during the Troubles, when a misreading of symbols, from the complicated iconology of Orange Order banners to the myriad symbols adopted by republican factions, may have been a matter of life or death. While I was in Ulster, I had direct experience of this sensitivity to symbols. In Donegal, the blue colour of my seemingly innocuous M & S rain jacket, bought especially for the trip, meant I was accused of being a member of the police. Twice. And again (I think, though not in so many words) in the Falls Road in Belfast. Spotting my blue-clad figure coming towards him, a local tapped a metal ruler he was holding (a tool of his trade?) on the edge of a rubbish bin. I took this to be a throwback to the practice, used by republican communities during the Troubles, of hitting bin lids to signal the approach of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or the British Army (it was also used to mark the death of hunger strikers in 1981 and to rally ensuing protests). Thankfully, my kiwi accent distinguished me as a harmless tourist (and, crucially in some circles, not English). An Irish artist friend speculated that the identification of me and my blue raincoat with the police may have had something to do with the state of attentiveness such a recce requires – I don’t know, but it was a curious thing indeed. Maybe it was paranoia. Across the way on the Shankill Road, no such doubt: the appearence of a Donegal tweed cap I was wearing, which I’d picked up in Glencolumbkille (Co. Donegal), prompted a spotty youth to shout: ‘F**k off back to Donegal.’ Happy, by the way, to be associated with that fine county, and at least I was no longer being branded a cop, ‘that seeming incarnation of a hostile world’, as Hannah Arendt put it. (The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, p. 88).
The offending Donegal tweed cap.
So, I was in this slightly dark and gloomy pub in Virginia, sheltering from the rain while I waited for the bus, literally because of sperm: the birth of my maternal great-grandfather – James ‘Jimmy’ Cooney – was registered in Ballyjamesduff, hence my pilgrimage. My research on distant relations in the vicinity was pretty lack-lustre due to a feeling of entropy produced by bereavement, so I was heading there pretty much on spec. Just ‘blowing in’, as my mother would’ve said. An email from an extremely dedicated family archivist with the lowdown on the Cavan Cooneys – ‘my people’, as they say in Ireland – arrived a day too late — I’ d already moved on. Fortunately, a friend in Dublin had spoken of a Ballyjamesduff family connection. Apparently, she herself had spent many a childhood summer in the area and her first cousin was currently the director of the Cavan County Museum. The cousin was ‘great craic’ and bound to be of help, so my friend reassured me. The bus trundled through green, gentle, rolling hills and fields. The sun tried to nudge through the clouds.
In the Irish country song ‘Come Back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff’, written by Percy French in 1912, Ballyjamesduff is remembered, lovingly, as a garden of Eden: ‘The grass it is green, as from Ballyjamesduff,/And the blue sky is over it all.’ I wonder if Jimmy Cooney heard the place calling for him all the way to Oamaru , in the South Island of New Zealand (over 19,000km), as did Paddy Riley, the ‘toil-torn and rough’ emigrant to Scotland. In the song, a voice: ‘Still whispers over the sea’:
‘Come back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff,/Come home Paddy Reilly to me.’
While the real Paddy O’Reilly, a local jarvey (driver of a hackney coach or jaunting car) who drove round the town, often with French as a passenger, eventually returned to Ballyjamesduff (according to this Belfast Telegraph article), the majority of ‘Paddies’ left, never to return. Jimmy Cooney was amongst these, though he did not forget his far-off homeland. Having become a successful businessman in Oamaru, he was to play a minor role in the early twentieth century fight for home rule in Ireland. According to his death notice in the local paper, published on July 27, 1938:
As an Irishman he was staunch and in the bad old days when Ireland was fighting for freedom and Irish delegates paid visits to New Zealand to enlist financial assistance, ‘Cooney’s Store’ was the focus of activity by local Home Rulers for the cause of Ireland’s valiant fight, and Mr Cooney acted as treasurer for all the committees formed to assist the delegates.
It’s amazing to think how this small-town shopkeeper, perched on the far reaches of the Empire, was to remain interwoven in this international network. A photo of himself in front of what became known as ‘Cooney’s Corner’, showing the shopfront festooned with flags (including what I guess is the Irish tricolour), suggests he was very much aware of this internationalist outlook.
Jimmy Cooney in front of ‘Cooney’s Corner’, a grain and seed store on the intersection of Severn, Coquet and Thames Streets in Oamaru, Te Wai Pounamu/South Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
It is clear that Jimmy developed into canny businessman in his adopted hometown after he arrived in 1878. He’d found his way there via a spell in Queensland for a few years, having left Ballyjamesduff aged 16 or 17. In an article in The Tablet (21 February 1999), written to celebrate the affixing of a plaque on the site of ‘Cooney’s Corner’, the writer Fred Howard recounts that the population of Oamaru was around 5000 at the time and the country was in a depression. Since wool was being sold off at a song, farmers turned to growing grain to supplement their income. Jimmy set himself up as a grain and seed merchant, with a sideline importing tea from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). (Remember too that this was less than 40 years after the signing in 1840 of the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi between representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs (rangatira) acting on behalf of their hapū (sub-tribes), so this was a very new colonial set-up. As a comparison, the Irish plantations – the foundations of the colonisation of Ireland by England – date back to the 16th and 17th centuries. In fact, Cavan town was the first Ulster town under the Ulster Plantation scheme to be incorporated and receive its charter, in November 1610.)
I wonder if Jimmy’s departure from Co. Cavan around the end of the 1860s was accompanied by an ‘American Wake’, which is described in a caption at the Cavan County Museum as an Irish ritual that mirrors the vigil kept over the dead until their burial. The ‘American Wake’ acknowleded the sense of bereavement felt by the family of the emigrant, since it was in many cases a farewell to a loved one who might never be seen again:
The American Wake was a combination of celebrating the person who was leaving and mourning over their going. It would be marked by singing, music, drink and tobacco and continue through the night until the early hours with serious conversation and advice for the young emigrant. As the time to depart drew near women noted for their ability to keen (wail or lament) would be called upon to acquaint listeners with the virtues of the emigrant and the suffering brought upon the parents by the departure. This eulogy was given in a high pitched wail, resulting in a room full of keening women and weeping men.
These sad farewells would have been a common feature in the social life of Ireland both before and after the Great Famine of 1845-9. The population of Ireland sank from 8,200,000 in the early 1840s to 4,400,000 in 1911, with a dramatic loss of 2,225,000 of the population between 1845 and 1851 through disease, starvation and emigration. (R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, London: Penguin, 1989, p. 323). At least 3,000,000 emigrated from Ireland between 1845 and 1870. (Foster, p. 345). Jimmy’s emigration (along with many of his siblings) from a smallholding in the Cavan townland of Carricknamaddoo (Irish: Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs) is probably in part explained by what R.F. Foster identifies as an ‘intrinsic part of the Irish rural mentality: the need to preserve the family farm.’
Emigration after the Famine did not release land for consolidation into larger units, as the theoreticians had hoped; farm owners were not emigrating. Their ‘assisting relatives’ were … to clear the way for an undivided inheritance by leaving. Subdivision and partible inheritance had long given way to the ‘stem family’ method of descent, where one inheritor took over, often late in life. (Foster, p. 351).
Jimmy’s future wife, Margaret Page, was also the offspring of an Irish farmer, in her case from Galway.
James Brenan, The Finishing Touch, 1876, oil on canvas. In the middle of the composition, set in a Cork farmhouse, the stooped figure of a father of a young woman, on the eve of her departure to America, lays his hand on her green travelling box as the engraver finishes decorating the carving of her name ‘O’Connor’ and destination ‘New York’. Behind these two, on the left, the young woman is adjusting her hat and talking to her mother. To the right, her younger brother carries turf into the kitchen, in a creel on his back. A shadowy figure behind him contemplates the scene.Notice promoting female emigration to New South Wales from Cork, Ireland c. 1835The son and daughter of Irish farmers – James Cooney and Margaret Page were married on 24 June 1884 at St. Patrick’s Church, Oamaru, New Zealand/Aotearoa.
When I got to the Cavan County Museum in Ballyjamesduff, I met my friend’s first cousin – Savina Donohoe, who was the director of the museum. Like a whirlwind, she was soon on the trail of the Cooneys of Co. Cavan until we stumbled across a name I recognised from my mother’s archival papers – one Eithne Brady. Eithne and I arranged to meet the following day. She picked me up from my hotel in the morning and our first stop was St. Mary’s Church cemetery, Clanaphilip (Eaglais Chlainne Philib), in the townland of Termon (An Tearmann), in the parish of Killinkere (Cillín Chéir – the little church of Cair). This is where some of my ancestors are buried, but the gravestone erected by my great-great-grandfather, Peter Cooney, Jimmy’s father, solely commemorates his first wife, Jimmy’s mother and my great-great-grandmother Susan Cooney (nee Cusack), who died on 17th June, 1857, aged 32.
The inscription on the gravestone reads:
Peter Cooney in memory of his beloved wife Susan Cooney who died June 17th 1857, aged 32 years
Adieu dear friends wipe off your tears
Here I must lie until Christ appears
and when he comes I hope to rise
unto a life that never dies
Eithne’s great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather Peter Cooney’s remains are also here. One of his sons from his second wife Elizabeth (Eliza) Brady (b. 1838, d. 1901), Thomas, managed to buy out the Carricknamaddoo farm, where my great-grandfather Jimmy was also brought up. Thomas’s son Peter is Eithne’s father. She still lives on the farm today.
Carricknamaddoo homestead, as it is today.This window may be all that remains of the 19th building that my great-grandfather Jimmy grew up in.Cooney farm at Carricknamaddoo (Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs).Cooney farm at Carricknamaddoo (Carraig na Madadh: the rock of the dogs).
Flor Kent, Für das Kind/Pro Dítê [For the Child] – Displaced, 2003, Liverpool Street Station, London.
During the last week of January, this sculpture tucked against a wall inside Liverpool Street Station crowded my peripheral vision. When I stopped to take a photo, the couple of people leaning against the plinth, attending to their phone screens, looked a bit taken aback – they, too, hadn’t noticed it was there. This blinkered ambivalence echoes the oft-quoted line from writer, peace activist and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” My attention was drawn to the modest Kindertransport memorial by a knot of co-incidences: the passing of Boris Johnson’s “Brexit Bill” [the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act] on 22 January 2020, Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of the month, and the “departure” of Britain from the EU on the 31st.
Für das Kind, by the scuptor Flor Kent, is part of a series of similarly named sculptures linking London to Hlavní Nídraží Station in Prague and Vienna’s Westbahnhof Station. The series both memorialises some 10,000 children who arrived in the UK around 1938-39 to escape Nazi persecution and also pays tribute to those private individuals and charities, acting without state funding, who lobbied the British government to initiate a visa waiver system for unaccompanied minors fleeing persecution and helped facilitate the transport. Many of these children disembarked at Liverpool Street Station in London. Among these was six-year-old Alf Dubs – one of the 669 children transported from Prague in March 1939. After 48 hours on the train, Alf was met by his father, Hubert, who had previously managed to flee Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. His mother, Frida, originally from Austria, was also able to escape shortly afterwards on 31 August, immediately before war broke out on 1 September. Hubert died not long after that, and Frida was left with nothing. Despite these tragic circumstances, the Dubs family was able to stay in the UK. Many others in similar circumstances were unable to turn their temporary entry permits into more permanent visas since Jewish refugees were not considered particularly desirable, displaying an attitude that glimmers of today’s “hostile environment” for immigration. (Indeed, Becky Taylor and Kate Ferguson, the authors of “Refugee History: The 1930s crisis and today” – a report by historians from the University of East Anglia for an All-Party Parliamentary Group – have commented that the word “undesirable” cropped up frequently in the archives related to wartime and post-war immigration, particularly in relation to policymakers keen to curb state support for refugees.)
Little Alf later became a Labour activist and MP, and was eventually given a peerage in 1994. In April 2016, at the height of the recent migrant crisis and at a moment when the Vote Leave campaigners were cynically stirring up xenophobic sentiment to secure the populist vote, Lord Dubs successfully petitioned an amendment to the Immigration Act, offering protection to 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children travelling to Britain from other parts of Europe. Despite his efforts, in the first two years of the scheme, just 220 children were able to benefit from the legislation (based on the Dublin Regulation) as it was promptly submerged by Teresa May’s “hostile environment” for immigration – a strategy for the continuance of state racism that has been exposed during the (ongoing) Windrush scandal.
While the Dubs amendment was written into May’s EU withdrawal bill, it was removed after the election of Boris Johnson’s government, blocking the legal right to family reunion for lone children, many stranded in refugee camps in Calais, Greece and elsewhere. On 22 January 2020, Boris Johnson’s “Brexit bill” passed through parliament after the government overturned five House of Lords amendments, including one tabled by Lord Dubs that aimed to restore the right of unaccompanied child refugees to be reunited with their families in the UK after Brexit. This amendment, which was rejected by Conservative MPs by an 88-vote majority, sought to reinstate a previous version of the Brexit bill that required the government to coordinate with the EU to ensure that unaccompanied minors could continue to join relatives in the UK. Yet Boris Johnson happily made political capital on Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, despite his government’s thumping refusal to assist asylum for children currently adrift from their families and barely surviving in unimaginable conditions. Five days later, Britain had “left” the EU (although, despite rumours, that doesn’t mean Brexit “got done”).
Críosog Bridghe: St. Brigid’s Cross woven from straw rushes, associated with Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of Ireland. Traditionally, these crosses are made in Ireland to commemorate St. Brigid’s feast day on 1 February, which also marks the pagan festival Imbolc, celebrating the beginning of Spring.
On Friday 31 January 2020, a message appeared on the Tyrone GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) Facebook page:
Anocht is Uaigneach Tír Eoghain … Tonight Tyrone is Lonely.
The post’s author also cited the Irish saying Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine, which translates as something like: “It is in each other’s shadow that we flourish,” encompassing the wider implications of mutual support and shelter, hospitality, community and empathy. By contrast, Tyrone (NI) was “lonely” that dark night at the end of January in anticipation of its removal from the EU and its guarantee of a continuing mutual interdependence promised to this particular Ulster sports’ association. The poster continued: “It’s a bit perverse that this happens on St Brigid’s Eve, when the welcoming of strangers into the house is a central part of the St Brigid’s Cross-Making tradition.” St. Brigid’s Eve marks the last day of winter and the transition to spring on 1 February. The commemoration derives from Imbolc: one of the four festivals (Celtic quarter days) marking seasonal transitions in pre-Christian Ireland. St. Brigid is a Christian version (or appropriation) of an ancient nature goddess – the Celtic goddess Bríd. Traditionally, crosses woven out of rushes were (are) hung over doors or in rafters as a sign of welcome and an invocation to St. Brigid to watch over the forthcoming lambing and calving season. Crosses hung in stables invited the saint to bless animals and ameliorate birth – ‘Imbolc’ translates as “in the belly” and is associated with parturition. Lore suggests that Brigid also protected cows, their calves and also their milk. In some places, poorer neighbours were offered gifts of milk and butter. St. Brigid is also associated with generosity towards the poor and ill, and the welfare of children and young adults.
Faced with the impression that the veneration of Brigid offers of an ideal symbiosis between communities and natural resources based on empathy and mutual sustenance, it seems little wonder that the good people of the Tyrone GAA felt somewhat bleak over the imminent reconstitution of the border with their neighbours at the end of their lane in Donegal. A few days later, former European Council president Donald Tusk, speaking to Andrew Marr (Andrew Marr Show, BBC, 2 February 2020) pointedly explained:
“Brexit is not about frictionless trade but about friction-more trade […] Brexit is about borders […] the synonym of Brexit is the re-establishment of borders.”
Still, the return of the light and new hope, signified by Brigid, may beckon renewed calls for the promise (or risk, some might say) of the reunification of Ireland, which was underscored a week or so after St. Brigid’s Day when Sinn Féin won 37 seats in the Irish General Election. In that battle, it was housing and welfare – “home” even more than “homeland” – that seemed to have been the key issues. Maybe this is what Bríd/Brigid had in mind for 2020.
Elsewhere:
Brexit brings uncertainty about changing border regulations between the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar and the Kingdom of Spain. Around 15,000 people a day travel into Gibraltar from Spain for work. Despite most Gibraltans voting against Brexit, the region may face the prospect of a post-Brexit “hard border,” unless Britain is able to make a bilateral agreement with Spain that will be workable under EU rules.
