I think back to my childhood, growing up in an Irish working class family in Birmingham during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. While I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the violence was everywhere: in the heated arguments between my parents (always about money, or the lack of it); the wallpaper which covered my bedroom (two pirates fighting over a pot of gold); in the news reports on telly (including the latest atrocities in Northern Ireland); the massive lay-offs in car plants across the country and the many strikes that ensued; history class at school, where I learned about the Kings and Queens of England and of the great war heroes (oh how the British love their war heroes!), all taught by a man by the name of Moran - I love the irony of it now; the adverts on telly that fooled me into believing I could have anything, be anything I wanted; the teachers who said I’d be nothing; the neighbours who hammered on the walls whenever we had a ‘hooley’ in the house; the constant bullying at school by class mates and teachers; the phoney ‘wars’ we had with kids from neighbouring estates; and in the playground ‘who wants to play, cowboys and indians?’; the life-size statue of the Jesus on the cross which hung in the church (for years, I thought it was real!); the IRA bombing campaign, in particular the Birmingham bombings of November 1974; and the policemen who came to the house, not once but twice to question my Dad – because he was Irish, and every Irishman was a terrorist (‘Is Dad going to jail, Mum?’).

My conscientisation began proper in my early teens. Punk had a lot to do with it. I was 14 when I bought my first LP – ‘All Mod Cons’ by The Jam. On it is a song called ‘Mr Clean.’ It goes: ‘please don’t forget me, or any of my kind / …when I stick your face in the grime.’ Around this time, I went out on my first date with Delma Hudson, a girl from my class at school. We went to the cinema (can’t remember the film we saw). Her Mum insisted on accompanying us. On the way home, she asked: ‘where do you live?’ I told her I lived in a Council house. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re only renting. We’re buying our house.’ The fuse was lit, and it’s been burning ever since.

Being Catholic meant having to go to Mass, every week. After Mass, you met all your aunties and uncles and cousins outside the church. They are happy memories. Not so happy was when Dad told me I couldn’t join the Boys Brigade. All my friends were in it. Oh, the innocence of childhood – I wish I had it all over again. I see it in my ten year old son, and envy him.

By the way, have you read ‘Tarry Flynn’ by Patrick Kavanagh? It’s set in rural Ireland. There was alot in the main character that I could recognise in myself, me a city dweller all my life. It’s one book by an Irish author that has really affected me.

Cheers Conor - and thanks.

The Irish community wasn’t exactly ghettoised back then (my class at [grammar] school was arranged alphabetically, and I still remember the names of the lads sat around me: Clarke, Duffy, Gannon, GREEN, Harkin, Hearne) but there was undoubtedly an Irish working-class home life that was unique in some of its features that was never as far as i can recall dramatized in the U.K., at least not in the 70s and 80s. Since then, there’s been Ken Loach’s Raining Stones, of course, but there was no great inclination to treat the Irish working-class experience in England as something worth examining.