My mother moved to England with me and another 5 siblings from Dublin. Not that she wanted to but felt she had to. There was domestic abuse in the household. My parents divorced and my mother rared us as best she could. She’s a great strong woman. A few years back she was looking into moving back home. She was told that even tho she worked full time in Dublin for 15yrs that her stamps are no longer valid. That if she moved back she would not be eligible to apply for rent supplement for atleast 6 mths. It was always a move that she hated having to make and has always longed to come home. She has lots of family here. Its like the Goverment have put up loads of hurdles that virtually make it impossible for her to come home.

Tragic. Similar to the lost Irish generations in the U.S. I volunteered in Chicago for a time with elder Irish immigrants. Lost, lonely mostly single older men. Such sad memories they had of an Ireland they had long left behind. Often no family or friends. All former links to family and friends gone. Some lived in tiny flats in huge tower blocks. One of them shared my Irish surname. A man in his late seventies. He used to beg me to visit everyday just because of that communality and to hear an Irish accent. He died lonely. It was 2009. I remember that monster then minister FF’s Mary Hannifin visiting on one of her tax payer funded holidays. She dismissed their needs when I informed her of the reality. Of course none had votes to give her.

Typically there were large families in Ireland and if you weren’t inheriting the family farm and lived in the middle of nowhere you had no choice but to emigrate.. if you had left school after primary school and the local priest had given you some extra attention it added to the horror of how awful it must have been for many of these people…
Very sad.

Most Irish in Britain marry either Irish or British people. They have kids. They integrate & assimilate in to British society and do very well in many cases. The majority are not all dying alone in mildewed bedsits.

Working in london over a long period of time i ran into many of these characters ,most left very young ,my own uncle at sixteen ,non of them were afraid of work ,but many should never have left home ,some were not mentally strong enough , they tried their best ,some irish families were happy to see them go, fear they would let the family name down if they stayed .despite all their hardship they found friendship in strangers and other irish in the same boat as themselves ,people that would not judge them .my own uncle went on to fight in the second world war ,i have his campaign medals at home ,after the war he found steady employment and made a success out of his life .england had given opportunity he could not find in ireland .he was not afraid of work ,or facing up to the germans ,and fortunately for him he was mentally strong ,unlike so many of his own country men

I remember reading in one of the daily papers in Ireland in the eighties or nineties about an old woman in Dublin who had no friends or relatives to accompany her remains to the graveyard except for a few nuns who attended out of Christian charity. I thought it was terribly sad.

AIH Dev’s Ireland and then noonan’s sometime’s when the link is broke ,it’s broke

please lets start looking after our old single lonly here as well.plenty here as well .loneness can be a silent killer . the goverment should be ashamed of themselves

Got to admire these people. But their kids will be British or yanks or Aussies. Best place to be Irish remains Ireland.

I am writing because my stepdad was one of the generation who was young in the 1950s wave of emigrants.
he was 19 in 1954 leaving Cork and hoping that one day he would return to the place and see out his final years.
My mother often referred to what my godfather who did return to Ireland called Quiet Man Syndrome after the classic John Wayne film, I used to love watching on video as a kid, that many were ashamed to return because of the “I told you so” menatality of those who hadn’t the guts to leave and make a go of it elsewhere, if they hadn’t come back successful and rich.
This might have been part of the reason why he resisted going back and only dreamed of it. He couldn’t afford a house to buy as he was only living in a council bungalow in his last years on a state pension.
What annoyed me was that as has been oft-quoted, the irish emigrant remittances in 1961 equaled the cost the Irish government spent that year on education for every school child so it was a valuable contribution which helped their country enormously.
Now that these people are old and may have health issues and want a last chance to return to their hometowns they have less chance than someone who is from any other EU nation and not paid anything into the Irish coffers as yet.
Look after your own first

London. The city that puts the “Lon” into lonely. I lived in other English cities, but London was the place for employment. Opportunities everywhere. No more to be said about working the “lump” system, waiting for the builder’s van in the morning and the prospect of returning to a room that night furnished with little more than a bed, a fridge, a chest of drawers and, if it wasn’t out on the landing to be shared by all the other emigres, a cooker. Or more likely, a “Baby-Belling” table top cooker. An instantaneous hot water heater mounted over the sink for your dishes and stand up washing, as you shared the (one) bathroom with the rest of the house. Electricity and gas on a meter. An A and B button payphone in the hallway with a light switch on a timer, so you could see your coins.