BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page i Choosing the Green? Second Generation Irish and the Cause of Ireland Brian Dooley For Esther Dooley, born in Dublin on Thursday, September 13, 2001 BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page ii First published 2004 by Beyond the Pale BTP Publications Ltd Unit 2.1.2 Conway Mill 5-7 Conway Street Belfast BT13 2DE Tel: +44 (0)28 90 438630 Fax: +44 (0)28 90 439707 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.btpale.com Copyright © 2004 Brian Dooley. The moral right of Brian Dooley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, without written permission from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-900960-26-5 Printed in Dublin by Colour Books Ltd. BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page iii Contents Acknowledgements iv Introduction vi 1. Irish like Mick McCarthy and Morrissey 1 2. Identity Parade 18 3. Cockney Rebels 31 4. Fighting the Empire 50 5. Fighting Ourselves 58 6. Seán MacStiofáin joins the IRA 68 7. Provos March On 80 8. Second Generation Victims 94 9. The Unusual Suspects 108 10. As Irish as the IRA 120 11. Identity Politics 137 12. Misfit Soldiers 142 13. Faith of Our Fathers 154 Endnotes 167 Bibliography 181 BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page iv Acknowledgements It’s fairly usual for authors to open their acknowledgements with a heartfelt thanks to the such-and-such trust or the so-and- so foundation that funded their research, or at least the academic institution that provided the time and space, and sometimes a fellowship, to complete their project. This book was written without the benefits of such resources – none were offered, and none sought. It took several years of whatever ‘spare’ time I could find between doing a full-time job and bringing up a baby, and I paid for all travel, phone and other expenses myself. I include this information not in any bid for canonisation, but to encourage others daunted by the prospect of embarking on a book project without the advantages of a full-time academic career. It is possible if you are prepared to take your time, can find an understanding publisher, and have the support of a great family. That said, this book depended on many people who helped me find contacts. These include Joe Bradley, Kieran Clifford, Alastair Logan, Martín MacOiste, Padraig Ó Cuanacháin and Maurice Quinlivan. Others who helped include Shane O’Neill at the Irish Post, who sent me important archive material. Michael Crowley read parts of the manuscript and offered incisive advice, while Jim Doherty scoured his brain for details of his glamorous showband career in 1980s Kilburn. Conor Foley shared his experiences under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) with me, and Paddy Hillyard was also enormously helpful in his analysis of how many second generation Irish people were included in his iv BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page v v landmark study of the PTA. Ursula Fraser explained the intricacies of nationality under Irish constitutional law, and Brian Ruane offered an objective and valuable analysis of Seán MacStiofáin’s Irish language accent. I’d also like to thank those people who agreed to be interviewed. Without them it would have been impossible to write this book. They include Margaret Brady, Kieran Clifford, Kevin Day, Pat Doherty MP, Ellen Duncan, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, Michael Gallagher, Paddy Kelly, Martin McNamara, Vince, John and Pat Maguire, Jimmy Murphy, Theresa Moriarty, Sean Ó Ceallacháin and the late Seán MacStiofáin, whom I spent many hours interviewing not long before his death. A very special thanks to Alison, for putting up with it all again. It’s time she wrote a book about living with someone who’s writing a book. BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page vi Introduction had to spend the afternoon of Saturday October 7, 2000 at a meeting in my office in Dublin while Kerry were playing IGalway in the All-Ireland Football Championship final replay. I desperately wanted to see the end of the match, and rushed into the nearest bar just as a crowd pushed its way out the door, the game obviously having just finished. ‘What was the score?’ I asked the nearest person. ‘Hahaha,’ he shouted at me in a Dublin accent. ‘You lost, you lost’ and pointed up at the giant screen, which said ENGLAND 0, GERMANY 1 in a world cup qualifier. He had wrongly assumed all sorts of things from my London accent – that I didn’t follow GAA, that I wasn’t Irish, that I supported the England football team. ‘Wait,’ I wanted to shout back, ‘my cousin Paddy Bawn Brosnan was a famous player in the great Kerry teams of the 1940s. I played Gaelic football for London. I live here. I’ve got an Irish passport…’ But he was gone, and I wouldn’t have said any of that anyway. As second generation Irish people know, those conversations are humiliating and risky. These struggles with Irishness go back to my school days in the 1970s. Most of my south London school-mates had Irish parents who had settled in England in the 1940s and 1950s, but we had been born and raised in London. Did that make us English or Irish? Most of us made regular summer trips to Ireland, looked Irish, even knew a few Irish words. Some of us just felt Irish - all our relations were Irish, as were most of our parents' friends, our priests and our teachers. vi BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page vii Introduction vii But identifying yourself as Irish was problematic. The IRA was attacking London and the explosions forced us to choose whose side we were on. We learned the words to rebel songs and read books about Easter 1916. Some of us joined underage Gaelic football teams in London. We were Irish wannabes, derided by Irish relations as 'Plastic Paddies' for not being the genuine article. And London Irishness was different from Irish Irishness or American Irishness. Cousins in Dublin or Boston weren't surrounded by English people, and couldn't understand why it was difficult - even dangerous - for us to wear shamrocks on St. Patrick's Day. For our parents' generation, the bombings made things even more complicated. Their accents immediately identified them as Irish in a city where Irish people were killing civilians. They were keen to show suspicious Londoners that the IRA didn't represent them, and missed few chances to denounce the bombings. Irish clubs across London banned IRA songs - modern and ancient - from their dances lest there be any doubt about their loyalties. On weekdays my dad worked as a postman, and when one of his workmates had his fingers blown off by an IRA letter bomb we were scared he would be next. At weekends he moonlighted as a cabbie, and we waited in silence for his safe return every time a news flash interrupted evening television to report another random bombing in central London. When we reached our late teens, most of my schoolmates and I were faced with the Great Passport Decision. Those of us with Irish parents had the choice to be British subjects or Irish citizens. It was an official, legal choice. You could be one or the other. Some opted for an Irish passport because it was a few pounds cheaper, but for others it was a decision loaded with political significance. The weekend of my 18th birthday, Bobby Sands began his hunger strike, and I chose an Irish passport. The arrival of an Irish passport was the ultimate validation of our claims - there it was, in green and white, our national status BrianDooleyfin 19/7/04 10:08 am Page viii viii Choosing the Green? legally declared. True, we had not been born in Ireland, but we had chosen Ireland in a way our Kerry cousins had never done, and surely that made us even more Irish? A few years later, things became easier for London Irish teenagers. Random bombings in the city were rare, and while militant Republicanism still has its pull for some youngsters (Londoner Diarmuid O'Neill joined the IRA, and was shot dead by police in Hammersmith in 1996), modern Irish London offers more than a miserable anti-Englishness. The success of The Pogues helped legitimise being Irish in London, and even made it trendy, while soccer stars like Tony Cascarino and Andy Townsend replaced Mac Stiofain (Chief of Staff of the Provisional IRA in 1970) as the new Cockney Irish heroes. Today's London kids with Irish parents are free from the edginess of the 1970s, and now the Irish or English dilemma is far more likely to be argued in the context of sport or music than political violence. Many years ago I left London, and went to live in Ireland, more at home than I ever felt in my life. Living in Ireland was all I hoped it would be when I dreamt of it 25 years ago. I played soccer in the local sports club where I was known, inevitable, as 'the English fella'. I have since returned to England. This book aims to help define what it means to be second or third generation Irish today.