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Karm Farrugia takes a holiday from telling Malta how to put its finances right and takes us on a trip down memory Ireland lane
My piece today is dedicated to the Irish community in Malta on the occasion of St Patrick’s Day on Wednesday.
I am taking sabbatical leave, as it were, from matters economic and financial to share with my readers some of my personal experiences with people and things Irish. I hope they make for happy reading.
Like most Maltese children I was brought up lumping all citizens of the British Isles as ‘English,’ whether they were Scots, Welsh or Irish. Certainly not the case today! I still remember the gentle scolding received at the hands of a lady who occasionally used to sit by me as I tried some peaceful angling from a secluded beach off Kalafrana.
I was just 13 and in my second year at the Lyceum, practising hard to improve the English I had picked up from soldiers during the war years. The war was barely over and life had yet to normalise, especially for my age-group. We had been totally deprived of any basic primary education for 4 years and had a lot to catch up with.
Mrs Price was a naval officer’s wife: he was English but she was resolutely Irish, as I eventually came to learn after I had had the temerity of introducing her to my buddy as my ‘English’ friend.
Nicholas Montserrat had just published ‘The Cruel Sea’ and Mrs Price ensured that I read it after finishing Walter Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe,’ the novel we had to study for our examinations. My weekly endeavours to converse with her were much more fruitful than the daily lessons in class.
Years later I worked for a month at a harvest camp in Lincolnshire, earning a pound a day helping farmers picking fruit or hops, stacking hay and muck spreading. There must have been a hundred or so of us, all youngsters on a working holiday. I was the only Maltese and Bella the only Irish person there, although she lived in Preston. Somehow we clicked; we seemed to have the same radical temperament wanting to change life for the underdogs in our respective countries. During those weeks I was able to differentiate between the English and the Irish from several aspects, not least the absence of that hateful colonialist superiority complex in a few (very few, but irksome) of the English there, whose disdain for the colonies which they never visited manifested itself even in my pronunciation, eg Tottenham Hotspares, instead of Hotspurs. Even Bella was not spared the jibes. Like me, she pronounced ‘three’ like ‘tree.’
I almost fancied staying on in Britain instead of returning to my work here as a taxman. There was then absolutely no unemployment in Britain and young people from the Commonwealth were encouraged to emigrate and ease the labour shortage problem. Four years later I did find myself living in London, but as a student, needing to work evenings and weekends to make ends meet. Surprising how plentiful was casual work in the early fifties, chiefly in jobs the average Englishman shunned - at railway stations, on the buses, in catering and, seasonally, at the post offices.
During my study years I was drawn to the Fisher Club at Westminster Cathedral for overseas catholic students. You can guess the number of Irish members. Somehow I was also elected president of my college’s students’ union and its representative on the council of the National Union of Students whose fortnightly weekend meetings were held in turn at various university campuses all over Britain, including Trinity College in Dublin. On occasions when I visited Belfast or Dublin I seized the opportunity to slip away on Sunday mornings to enjoy the beautiful green countryside and meet the Irish at home (and in pubs). The farmers were amongst the poorest citizens, often deprived even of basic services like electricity and telephones. But their generosity towards even poorer folk, like impecunious me, was unbelievable. I don’t think I have ever in my life enjoyed breakfast more than the Monday mornings at some B & B farmhouse before I travelled back to London that evening.
So, when later my bride opted to spend our honeymoon in Ireland, I was over delighted, especially meeting her maternal cousins in Ballynasloe. Her mother had fled to England at 17 to escape the cruelties of the Black and Tans and to seek work. Her younger brother, in fact, was killed by them, but her elder one managed to bring up a large family on a small farm. Years later, when we revisited Galway, each cousin lived in a most beautiful detached house, earned a comfortable living and afforded university education to all their children.
Courtesy of EU membership? Only very partially. In my eyes the work culture of the Irish people had undergone a fundamental transformation from almost complete dependence on the British market for their produce to a diversification towards Continental Europe to such an extent that they would have plumped for membership of the then Common Market mid-seventies even if Britain had stayed out. More recently, we have seen Ireland unhesitatingly joining Euroland, whilst Britain continues to dither. And its national income per capita has now reached parity with Britain’s, perhaps even higher. Thanks to their several social pacts over 2 decades which we here could do well to emulate. Indeed, we must.
I was once told by an American industrialist in Shannon that labour costs were not as low as people made them out to be, particularly because of Monday’s high degree of absenteeism from work. Men drank so much beer over the weekend that most of them suffered a hangover on Monday mornings. As usual, an exaggerated statement. I was there studying how the Malta Development Corporation could follow on the success of the Irish Development Board. The help I was proffered made me forget the sadness of my previous evening in Belfast at the height of the civil rights marches. I had met Bernardette Devlin, an elected member of the British parliament, famous (or notorious) for her struggle to secure equality of treatment for the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. David Frost was in Belfast with a full BBC crew chairing a live televised debate, the highlight of which was one of the two Catholic speakers producing a board full of comparative discriminatory statistics which shocked me.
Are you surprised that, as I write, Bing Crosby is crooning “Does you mother come from Ireland? There is something in you Irish”….and a cool Guinness can is already half down? What a delicious musical package of songs bubbling with humour and sentiment which make the Irish such delightful people to have around.
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