Like every other English-born second-generation Irish kid, I went ‘Home’ every summer for three weeks.
Ireland, ‘Home,’ was a wonderland for us London children. Scary giant cows, old women in shawls, midges, days on the bog, arguments over whose shoes had cow-shite on them in the car and Bridie Griffiths’s hot sweet apple tart along with those wasted afternoons spent watching the rain run down the windowpanes next to her blazing turf stove. Bliss.
By the time I hit my teens I was infatuated with dark haired boys, Planxty, Yeats, Edna O’Brien, the craic, and the purple velvet moss of a Mayo bog at sunset.
By my twenties, I was so helplessly in love that nothing would stop me from moving ‘Home’ to the wilds of Mayo from the suburban streets of Hendon.
But suddenly I was now a stranger in a strange land. An English ‘tan’ – I never lost my London accent – who was forever being asked as to why I was here.
‘Yes, but where are ye really from?’
I wanted to be cherished, embraced, welcomed – Céad mile Failte – but instead I was questioned, interrogated and dismissed as some English interloper. Or worse ‘a blow-in.’
Thirty seconds ahead, I could see that question coming out of the Irish-Irish mouths like some thought bubble in a cartoon. I had come Home to live out my Irishness but instead everyone seemed to want to redefine me as that foreign English lady. Or behind my back – ‘that English bitch.’
I really wanted to blend in. In front of the mirror at home in Killala I practised, again and again, enunciating my mum’s hometown, ‘BALL-LIN-NA, with as thick a Mayo accent as I dared. But every time I opened my mouth I felt like a fraud. I even grew to hate my own English accent.
I moved from London to Dublin to edit Irish Tatler for Irish toffs who mimicked the very English toffs I had escaped from. I fled back to Mayo and wrote Irish novels with characters called Aoife, Siobhán and Fiachra. I was a success, an Irish romantic novelist with an Irish husband and Irish children. I was as Irish as Irish as it was possible to be. Except I wasn’t.
I chose my ‘Irishness’ but in truth my ‘Irish-Britishness’ was never recognised as the real thing. I was deemed a fake, a Plastic Paddy. But I was not alone.
Shane McGowan, born in Tunbridge Wells and as authentic an Irishman as ever lived, kept his strong London accent but it was years before he was accepted. And then finally lionized in death. The rest of us mere mortals were and are still required to account for our English sins.
Truthfully, those Irish who have English accents are still far from accepted as Irish in Ireland. Children are still being mocked in school for their English accents and their parents held at a distance.
We all want to be loved so for years even at the school gate as I picked up my Irish kids I kept on apologising about my ‘Irishness.’
I would explain how I was born and bought up in London - then give them my ‘I really am Irish’ spiel. How my grandfather was a captain in the old IRA, how my mother lives in Ballina, etc.’
They’d look, nod, and then say it, dismissing me, my family.
‘Well, you haven’t lost your accent.’
In a post-menopausal flush, all that explaining away my English accent, all that justifying of my London-born Irishness, tore into me. I might not have been Irish enough for them, but I was fecking Irish enough for me. How dare they?
I knew I had to write something, get it down on paper. The result was our sell out Irish Play – Am I Irish Yet?
I had been so caught up with seeking acceptance for being ‘Irish’ in Ireland, chasing the same status of being born there, that I had failed to accept, cherish and celebrate the very Irishness I was gifted with. The unique experience of being born and growing up in the greatest Irish city on the planet, London.
In the years since, as I began researching and writing this play, I began to see my journey with fresh eyes. I wasn’t just telling my story; I was telling the story of the whole hidden tribe of all those second-generation Irish kids who grew up in England calling somewhere else ‘Home’ all their lives.
Funny, sad, laugh out loud, Am I Irish Yet? is a rollercoaster one-woman show, performed by myself, about the heart ache, the joys, and wonderful sense of belonging our tribe feels for our Irish homeland, regardless of where we were born.
I have been astonished by the response. In Ireland, after every show I have been embraced by a hidden legion of the seeming Irish who were too afraid to reclaim their English childhoods out of fear.
As it turns out, us ‘Plastic Paddies’ are almost as big in numbers as the Irish nation itself. And we have every right, ourselves alone, to claim and proclaim, like Shane MacGowan, our unique and wonderful true Irishness.
When Am I Irish Yet? opened at the Camden Irish Centre and then the White Bear Theatre in Kennington we sold out every show. My tribe, our tribe, the London-Irish came in droves so quickly we had to put on an extra week - which also sold out!
English accents, Irish hearts.
After the first night, John, came up to me grabbed my hand and said: ‘All my life - I have been waiting for somebody to tell my story. Thank you.’ And then he burst into tears.
His English wife stood beside him, beaming. ’It’s true,’ she said. ’Finally, someone has told our truth.’
I moved a grown man to tears. An Irish man.
Even with the luck of the Irish, telling our story doesn’t get any better than that.
Am I Irish Yet? by Kate Kerrigan opens at the White Bear Theatre, Kennington, London SE11 4DJ. MARCH 11-17 at 7.30pm nightly. Matinees Sat March 16 at 2.30pm, Sunday March 17 at 4.00pm.
Book tickets here.