THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

The memoir opens with an account of my paternal Irish grandfather, Thomas (Tom) Minogue, who came to England in the late 1890s to seek his fortune, the countryside of Ireland holding out scant promise in that respect. Good fortune did indeed strike him in the shape of Agnes, sweet-faced daughter of Michael and Mary Harrison, who ran a boarding house for Irish workers in Poppleton, in the city of York. Mary Harrison, my great-grandmother. A formidable matriarch, she was celebrated in local newspapers at her death as Pocklington’s first centenarian and described as the ‘Mother of Thousands’.

I was reminded of this background by a report in today’s Guardian, 4^th March 2021. It records that Pontin’s holiday camp operators had been caught blacklisting people with Irish surnames, saying ‘we do not want these people on our parks’. They also sought to exclude Gypsies and Travellers. All this was reported as a widespread practice for many years. The Executive Director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) judged that this practice amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. A leading charity commented that it was ‘hard not to draw comparisons with the signs displayed in hotels and boarding houses fifty years ago, explicitly barring Irish and black people’. More than 100 years ago, my great-grandmother’s boarding house gave a haven to young men who elsewhere had been repulsed by signs reading ‘No Dogs and No Irish’. It’s striking that this kind of discrimination was still alive and well in the 1970s, and continues, if clandestinely, to this day.

Tom and Agnes married on 13^th January 1902. My father Martin (yes, same name as me, another story told in Chapter Three of ‘Shifting Classes’), came somewhere in the middle of Tom and Agnes’s 11 children. Though a British citizen, he was 100% Irish by blood line, so in my book that makes me half Irish, a calculation further complicated by my mother’s Celtic inheritance through a Scottish maternal line. I regard myself as something of a mixture, part British, part Irish, part Scottish, and not 100% of anything. This came in useful in a later part of my working life, when I frequently travelled to and worked in countries where the British, or more specifically the ‘English’, were not universally admired. I would shamelessly claim to be Irish in these circumstances, even ready if need be to sing one of my Dad’s old Irish favourites. Danny Boy always went down a treat, and my work always went well the day after.

WORLD BOOK DAY

As today is World Book Day it seems appropriate to say what I’m reading just now. This is Shuggie Bain, amazingly a debut novel by Douglas Stuart, and winner of the 2020 Booker Prize (most deservedly so, something you cannot always say about these awards). Set in post-Thatcher Glasgow, it’s a compelling account of the brutal consequences of poverty and addiction (to alcohol rather than drugs), told in episodes which make you wince. At the centre is a mother, Agnes Bain, who cannot cope with the bad hands that life has dealt her in a persistently macho male-dominated society. She longs to find love, and seeks this desperately through her three children, but all in the end desert her, struggling to cope with their own lives and problems. There is plenty of warmth, and that tough brand of humour you find in downtrodden places, but the sense of horror and tragedy is always just below the skin. Above all, it rings utterly true, a revelation of the desperate lives many people lead in our deeply damaged society, and the absence from these lives of any real hope. A must-read.