One for the Road: Lest we forget

Leaving dos during The Great Famine were nicknamed American Wakes for a reason: In almost all cases, the only way you were ever going to see the star of the show’s pasty pan again was by making safe passage to the other side yourself.

But sometimes there was another way…

It is true that most of the emigrants who left Ireland between 1830 and 1850 never came home. Nature, aided by Mother England’s progressive, let-them-fend-for-themselves, independence-promoting parenting style, left men, women and children no choice but to board overcrowded coffin ships that, one way or another, usually sent them to their salvation.

About 100,000 found deliverance while still onboard these budget cruise liners, their souls normally set free by cholera, typhoid, malnutrition, or some combination of the three.

Others, ironically, escaped the clutches of this unholy trinity, only to die of dehydration, surrounded by the vast Atlantic Ocean.

But, for the rest of our one-million-odd ancestors who actually managed to survive the voyage, their luck was in: They stumbled down gangplanks all across the east coast of that great continent, first in Quebec, then later in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, and started the second chapter of their lives, in the New World – a place that was, just as it remains today, an egalitarian paradise where all newcomers are welcome, no matter who you are or where you’re from.

But here’s the astonishing part: Some of our ungrateful forefathers, having not emigrated by choice but by necessity, found that it was not love at first sight between them and their new home, and so started saving up for their return ticket, right away.

Imagine: You’ve just about got your land legs back after two months dodging death on a fetid, festering coffin ship. You take a dander around New York, check out the scene, then quickly realise you are willing to tempt fate twice in order to be repatriated with the land of saints, scholars and skeletons, where the second biggest problem after what to eat is where to bury the bodies…

I mean, I know a fella who seen no more of Australia than the vistas available from the arrivals lounge at Sydney Airport, but the men and women that resolved to return to Ireland in the 1800s must have been a different class of homebird altogether. Right?

I mean, what could the consoling thought have been as, boarding the boat home, that all-too-familiar miasma of death and disease rose from the cabins and filled their nostrils with dreadful nostalgia?

Perhaps the spuds have grown back?

Maybe the British Government has discovered the meaning of the word mercy?

I’d rather starve to death in Ireland than live with a full belly in this god-forsaken kip?

Who knows what went through their heads. Whatever it was, though, I’ve no doubt that it came from a place of utter desperation.

This week, watching Trump and his cronies continue their battle with the courts in order to execute their draconian immigration policy, I can’t help thinking of the desperate circumstances that drove today’s migrants to America, forcing them to leave their homes and families in Mexico, India, Philippines, Cuba, Columbia, Guatemala, El Salvador…

I’m sure, as the anti-immigration folk always stress, some of them left a decent life in search of an even better one.

But I’m equally certain that many others up and emigrated, not to chase the American dream, but to escape their domestic nightmare.

One of our country’s biggest embarrassments and Trump’s confessed ‘favourite Irish person’, Conor McGregor, recently gave a St Patrick’s Day address at the White House, during which he told journalists that “Ireland was potentially on the cusp of losing its Irishness”, referring to the resoundingly real and divisive immigration situation in the south.

As Irish people, though, we have a duty to look at what is happening in the world today through the prism of our own past, which means treating mass migration not primarily, as McGregors does, as a potential threat to our own way of life, but as the live, unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that it is.

Let’s not, when it comes to the displacement of other people, forget our history.

Paddies, Biddies and Micks we can take – but hypocrites, on the other hand, we can’t and shouldn’t.