Too Irish to be a Londoner or too London to be Irish?

Coming to England is a funny thing. You always think you’ll just be here to work for a few years before heading back to the Sod.

Most of us started out like that; a vague plan of making some money or riding out whatever recession happened to be current, before returning to hearth and home.

But then, before you know it; fifteen years pass, you’re married with children, saddled with a mortgage and you’re farther than ever from that dream of returning to your kith and kin. You still feel Irish, you still sound Irish and of course you still profess it at every opportunity.

But with the passing of each year in exile, that identity becomes more remote; inexorably dipping on the horizon of personal experience until finally, Ireland becomes a place more of the imagination than a fixed point in geography.

In the meantime, you come to the dawning realisation that while you’ve been busily holding on to your Irishness, you’re actually well on the way to becoming  a Londoner.

Now on the face of it, you might think that my Hibernian credentials would be pretty unassailable. I’ve got one of those ‘straight-from-central-casting’ kind of Oirish names for starters. In fact, it’s almost a name that carries a shovel over its shoulder and pig under its arm. And having grown up in Ireland, I still have the accent; even after nearly two decades back in London. Moreover, I’m the Irish version of that guy from ‘Goodness Gracious Me’: I’ll bore you witless with Irish claims to fame, from Zorro and Muhammad Ali to Barack Obama and Lord Wellington; ‘Che Guevara? He was Irish you know...’

In terms of identities, you might say I’m spoiled for choice (or beaten with the shit-stick, depending on your point of view).  I was born in Scotland, baptised in Battersea and then reared free-range on the Irish west coast before returning to live in South London.

So when I’m in London, I’m as Irish as Skibbereen (even when I leave the pig and shovel at home).To my amusement, I am invariably greeted with polite perplexity when I give ‘South London’ as the response when asked where I am from. I have, after all, lived most of my adult life within the M25, ‘sarf of the river’. I have roots and family here;  the first year of my life was spent in a little flat in Clapham. I could even spin returning to London  as a sort of a homecoming.

Of course, it’s not that simple (God knows, I wish it was). Much as I’d love to be able to profess that my first steps were the Lambeth Walk; that I was reared on pie and mash and that green liquor runs through my cockney rebel veins: it just wouldn’t be true. There’s apparently too much of the Tea Caddy in me for that.

But then, the minute I get off the plane at Knock Airport in County Mayo; I go through the looking glass. The harp-emblazoned passport I’d waved so proudly on the way out of England is viewed with the jaded disinterest of an airport Garda who’s lost count of the families he’s watched being broken up by immigration at the departure gates.

To the folks back home, I’m ‘beyond in England’. And when I’d go to the pub and stand a round, putting my crisp English money on the counter, my beer would be drunk and then someone would ask; ‘Why didn’t you go to ‘Merica?’ The land of my childhood is apparently just that. The American writer Thomas Wolfe wasn't kidding when he wrote  ‘You can’t go home again'.

Perhaps they’re right, maybe I have been gone too long. My Ireland in many ways has become a museum of the mind, a frozen snapshot of the country I left behind me nearly two decades ago; it certainly bears little resemblance to the place I visit in search of the familiar haunts of my youth.  Maybe now I need to live in London just so that I can define my nationality in opposition to the kaleidoscope of cultures all around me. (‘I’m not white, I’m Irish...’)

The native-born Irish have a mocking epithet for those of us born in Britain; we are ‘Plastic Paddies’. We somehow lack the questionable authenticity that an Irish birth cert apparently confers. I’ll always remember the horror of the Irish establishment when the Pogues first broke. ‘Who were these drunken London yahoos making a show of Ireland?’  The folks back home were always happy enough to take the money that was sent back by the men building the motorways or tunnelling under London for the Victoria and Jubilee lines but they were far less comfortable with the children of these men and women refracting Irish culture through a British lens.

For all its faults (and it has a few), the Gaelic Athletic Association is one organisation that has always recognised the importance of the Irish outside Ireland. For the purposes of league and championship football and hurling, both London and New York compete as counties. Among the more notable members of the London GAA in his time was iconic Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. Nowadays, as a mark of how far things have come within this staunchly nationalist organisation, the Metropolitan Police now fields a Gaelic football team which competes at club level here in London.

If being ‘plastic’ means John Lennon, Paul McCartney, John Lydon, The Smiths and Oasis (not to mention Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Shane MacGowan) then ‘Plastic Paddy’ is a righteous badge of honour by my reckoning.

I’m London Irish and proud of it. We built this damn town and our mark is everywhere: sometimes so ubiquitous that it’s almost invisible; in the media, in public life and in the very culture of the city’s working men.

McAlpine’s Fusiliers, Murphy’s Volunteers and Pincher Mac’s gangs of cable-pullers and heavy-diggers, The Crown in Cricklewood and the Archway Tavern: these are all mythologies in their own right. It was an Irish Fenian (Jim Connell) who wrote the words of ‘The Red Flag’ (while on a train from Charing Cross to New Cross) and it was Irish labourers who came to aid of the Jewish protesters against the Blackshirts in The Battle of Cable street.

Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh and the inimitable MacGowan have been writing love-letters to the London Irish for years now. The Ireland they evoke, with its poignant grotesques and black comedy, could only have come from this crazy cauldron of a city. If Irish London has a soundtrack; for me it’s probably ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ and ‘Transmetropolitan’.

County London; now that really is an Ireland of the imagination.

(I’m sure Scottish  readers will thank me for not trying to claim the land of my birth as my cultural identity, but I really was just born there by accident, albeit a happy one.)