Brexit: The town we loved so well

Mary Landers was born in 1937 in Leixlip. She grew up in Ireland’s Hungry Forties and, like so many Irish people, in her teens, she emigrated to Britain.

She first lived in Leicester, before moving to London, where she met John Pegley.

In 1966, she and John got married in the Sacred Heart Church on Quex Road in Kilburn. Mary was a woman of deep faith, and the Sacred Heart Church was at the centre of her life.

Her children were baptised there as were her grandchildren, the family attended Mass weekly, and it was the hub for her charity work, her volunteering, and for the dozens of annual trips to Lourdes she was instrumental in organising for her fellow parishioners.

Having raised their family and helped to build a community of Irish people in London, both Mary and John had intended to return to Ireland to enjoy their latter years. In 2006, John died of a heart attack while attending Mass in the church.

The loss hit Mary deeply, and her plans to return home were put on indefinite hold. Last week, Mary was buried in Leixlip alongside John after a brief battle with cancer.

In a ceremony in the Sacred Heart Church in Kilburn on Tuesday last, dozens of parishioners – some Irish, some Asian, some black, most of them elderly – came to see Mary off.

Father Mike Phelan looked out over a group that looked smaller than it was under the enormous vaulted ceilings of the church and explained to the congregation the lessons of the Gospel according to John.

In that passage, Father Phelan explained, Jesus told his disciples before his death that they should not be sorrowful, but instead should rejoice, “because I’m going to my father and your father, to my God and your God,” he said. “In other words, he was going home.

“Any homecoming is an occasion to rejoice and celebrate,” he told the mourners. “Saint Simeon asked: what exile living in a different country would not welcome the opportunity to return home and be reunited with all his loved ones?”

If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere

Earlier this month, British prime minister Theresa May made it clear what she meant by ‘Brexit means Brexit’: a hard Brexit with hard borders.

It has left many Irish immigrants in Britain feeling uneasy. Irish people have long had a legal right to live and work in Britain and are entitled to more social welfare rights than other European Union citizens.

But, as with so many things about Brexit, the preservation of those rights is now deeply uncertain. What does Theresa May mean by her speeches? What does it all mean for the roughly half-million Irish people living in Britain – half of whom live in London? Will they be forced to return to Ireland, or will they have to take British citizenship and British passports?

May told her fellow Conservative party members that “if you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.

Her rhetoric has raised a worrying question for Irish people in Britain: specifically, post-Brexit, what is home?

It was booming back then. We were in numbers

For many Irish people living in London, home was Kilburn – County Kilburn, as it was colloquially known.

Walk down the Kilburn High Road today and it is clear that time has long passed. There are a few remnants of the old neighbourhood so famously captured in The Kings of the Kilburn High Road – like the Kingdom Pub or the shrine to the forgotten Irish in the church on Quex Road or the fading sign for WM McGovern’s garage on Belsize Road – but there are very few Irish accents on the streets any more.

Halfway down the road, in Jumbo’s newsagents, Adeel Ijass, who works behind the counter, said that Irish newspapers still sold well – the Western People immediately springs to his mind, while a rack outside carries the Kerryman, the Mayo News, the Munster Express, and a dozen more, and so does Ireland’s Eye, but the sales figures have been dropping off for a number of years.

Just off Kilburn High Road, Martin McGlynn is the owner of McGlynn’s pub, which was once a Father Ted-themed bar.

McGlynn has lived in London since 1980, and he remembers just how Irish the neighbourhood was for years.

“It was booming back then. We were in numbers. In Kilburn, you’d have to pinch yourself, you’d think you were still in Ireland. It was staunch Irish.

“Every shop you went into, every pub, every bus you got onto,” was filled with Irish people. Today, there are very few, he said. “Any of the old-timers, they’re just wondering what has happened,” he said. “You’d think it could never come to an end. We were that strong. We were everywhere.”

On the day he spoke to The Sunday Business Post – a quiet Tuesday – the bar was mostly empty. Two men – one young, one old – were drinking and talking at the bar, and a time-worn couple sat by the window drinking in silence. The television was on, showing horseracing, but the sound was turned down.

McGlynn said that the Irish people who left Kilburn had probably headed for more well-heeled and affluent suburbs around the city.

“The young Irish, the young professional Irish, rather than come drinking down Kilburn High Road, they’re probably going down the West End or whatever,” he said. “Without a shadow of a doubt. It’s the place to be seen, isn’t it?

Patrick Byrnes of Limerick was standing at the bar having a pint. Byrne has been living in London for 50 years. He agreed with McGlynn that Irish people were still coming to London, but not to Kilburn.

“They had it good during the bubble,” he said, almost contemptuously. “They wouldn’t come here. They’re probably going to yuppie bars or something.”

During the years after the economic meltdown, young, educated Irish people flocked back to Britain. After 2008, more than 100,000 Irish people left Ireland for Britain, more than the US, Australia, Canada or any European country.

Unlike Mary Pegley, they did not go to build large communities of Irish people. Some sent money home, but nothing like the values sent through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when there were vast fortunes sent back to Ireland through the post office.

And, unlike the Irish emigrants of Mary Pegley’s era, the new professionals were mostly educated to third-level standard.

It led to a bifurcation of the Irish community in London between the older generation who had left during those difficult years expecting only to come back in their old age – if ever – and a more mobile, outward looking generation of young Irish professionals.

It also led to a significant divergence of views on Brexit.

Ian McClintock is the chief executive of the London Irish Centre, a registered charity and an Irish community organisation.

Before the Brexit referendum, McClintock’s organisation did some informal polling of the Irish population. McClintock describes that polling as “back of a fag packet stuff”, but it is indicative of a trend: the older Irish population in London were broadly supportive of the Leave campaign, while the younger Irish professionals were supportive of the Remain side.

“We sampled the Irish population through our social media, and 85 per cent wanted to stay, and the main issues were the damage Brexit could do to UK-Irish economic relations, and jobs,” he said.

Conversely, in a survey of older people carried out by way of a printed questionnaire, the result was quite different. “With older people, two-thirds wanted to leave. That reflects the general demography in the UK,” McClintock said. “Their top issue was border control.”

Lack of clarity

Older people who may have come by boat in the 1950s or 1960s, he said, didn’t have the same ability to move that Irish emigrants do now.

“Nowadays, if you fancy it, you just jump on Ryanair and you’re in Heathrow an hour later. For people to hop about and move about is just a reflection of the times. If the UK became less comfortable for the Irish, I think they’d just leave.”

But while both groups may have voted and felt differently about Brexit, any change will affect them both equally as Irish citizens.

McClintock pointed out that the lack of clarity is worrying people, not least after Theresa May’s speech.

“What I don’t know,” he said, “is whether what she’s saying was [an attempt at] playing to the Conservative gallery or not.”

From a business perspective, we will not wait

McClintock is not the only one worried. Liz Shanahan is an entrepreneur with more than 25 years’ experience in the health sector, and she has lived and worked in London and Britain for years. Shanahan is also chair of the Irish International Business Network.

She echoed the sentiments of many Irish people in Britain today: uncertainty is making people very uneasy.

“It is clear that foreigners are not hugely welcome here at the moment,” she said, referring to home secretary Amber Rudd’s suggestion that companies keep lists of their foreign workers to “flush out” companies not doing enough to hire British workers first.

“As the language became more focused around immigrants and the immigrant community, I think, on a personal basis, we’ve all started to feel more uncomfortable,” Shanahan said.

“We’re exactly the immigrants they’re talking about: completely economic migrants.”

This is not the language that business people like Shanahan have come to expect in Britain, and it has left many business people “feeling like you’re a very different nationality”.

“From a business perspective, we will not wait. We can’t wait to sit around and wait to see what the future holds; we have to be in control of our destiny.”

It means some may move, some may relocate to Ireland, for example, but it also might see some companies “rethink their workforce”, she said, because they may find it much more difficult to employ someone who isn’t a British citizen.

“For others, we may have to answer the question of whether we want to be British citizens and get British passports,” she said.

For those who move home, it’s not necessarily an easy decision either.

“People don’t just have businesses here, they have lives here. Many Irish people got married to British or European people – many are dual foreign nationals, but they have kids here who go to school who consider themselves British,” she said.

“I felt incredibly welcome here before the referendum and there was none of the tension you feel at the moment. It is a different place,” she said. “And some of the language that’s being used isn’t giving the reassurance that people like us need.”

Brexit has made it so that the option of going back to Ireland is much more attractive.

Jarlath Regan is an Irish comedian who has been living in Britain for four years with his wife and five-year-old son. He has incorporated a great deal of Brexit-related material into his nightly routines.

He has got particularly good mileage out of the Irish tendency to run referendums twice – a prospect which doesn’t look too outrageous an idea for Britain now, he said.

“When the will of the people changes, or isn’t really clear, in Ireland, we double check,” he told The Sunday Business Post, outlining the gist of his routine.

“When you close a word document, you get a pop-up that says, ‘Are you sure you want to save the changes you have made?’”

“That’s a joke I’ve made on stage many times. It’s always the line I find the Brexit voters in the audience have to agree with, even when they’re against me when I talk about the lies they were sold about the £350 million going to the NHS instead of to the EU.”

As a consequence of the referendum, he no longer sees his long-term future in Britain, he said.

“Brexit has made it so that the option of going back to Ireland is much more attractive.”

We’re all pilgrims, really, passing through

In McGlynn’s, Martin McGlynn did not believe that Irish people would be unduly affected by any change to Britain’s migration laws.

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen with Brexit,” he told The Sunday Business Post, but he was sure that May had made mention of the special position of Irish people in Britain. Meanwhile, the 1949 Ireland Act gives Irish citizens the same rights and entitlements as Commonwealth subjects.

Across the road in Sacred Heart, the parish priest, Fr Michael O’Sullivan, has been in Kilburn for just under three years, tending to the spiritual needs of the dwindling Irish flock.

For him, the older Irish community is not so worried about Brexit, placing – like McGlynn – great stock in Ireland’s special relationship with Britain.

“I hadn’t picked up [on any worry],” he said. “There seems to be a contentment because they have the passports. A lot of them, you hear them say, ‘I came over here and this country was very good to me. We were accepted.’ There’s a lot of appreciation.”

The young professionals don’t come his way as much. “I meet some of them, but they’re spread all over. They go to the hurling and football clubs.”

He sees far more funerals for older Irish people, with many of them being brought home to the counties they were born in.

“You’d be sad to see them leaving, [watching] the hearse and the funeral pulling out. They’ve been here since they were 17 or 18. It was only for a phase of their life,” he said.

“We’re all pilgrims, really, passing through.”