MY FATHER’S LIFE TOO: White Privilege? They were going over for a year or two. Just until things picked up at home. Tens of thousands of them never came back.

Some of it was simply life. They married, had children, built something, and England became home.

But for a great many of the men who dug the roads and the tunnels, built factories and created Britain’s current infrastructure, it went another way.

The work broke their bodies. The lodgings were temporary and stayed temporary. The years went by.

Every week, most of their earnings were sent home to parents, wives and their children who remained in ‘the auld country’ or had migrated to Britain. My father was one of the latter – Michael Walsh.

And there was shame in it

A man who had gone over to make something of himself, and hadn’t, found it very hard to walk back up the road at home.

So, he didn’t write. Then he hadn’t written in so long that he couldn’t. Then the people who would have been waiting for him were dead.

Largest homeless hostel in Europe

Arlington House in Camden Town opened in 1905 and became the largest homeless hostel in Europe, home to over a thousand men. It has been described as housing more Irishmen than any building outside Ireland.

The Lost Generation

In 2003, RTÉ’s Prime Time went looking for them in the hostels and side streets of north London, Coventry and Manchester.

They found men living out the end of their lives in poverty and isolation, forgotten by the country that bore them and overlooked by the one they built.

Ireland did eventually turn around and look. Organizations like the Aisling Return to Ireland Project in Camden and Safe Home Ireland in Mulranny, County Mayo, began bringing men back for visits, tracing the families they’d lost touch with

FORTY SHADES OF VERSE by Michael Walsh. In legend, verse and stories, this perfect gift provides the enigmatic mirror image of the ancient Irish Nation. Click the picture for more details.

Not even a ‘Thanks, Well Done’

Helping those who wanted it to come home for good. Some went back to Ireland for the first time in forty years.

In 2017, a plaque was unveiled at the Camden Irish Centre to the forgotten Irish. The woman behind it described them as the ones who shook the handkerchief off the back of the boat at Dún Laoghaire.

They sent millions home to a country that had nothing for them. Many of them got nothing back.  Was there a man in your family who went over and was never heard from again?

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