The title of Lemuel Gulliver’s book 300 years ago was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.
Every autumn, students travel to what seem to be remote nations, as far from Northern Ireland as, say, England or Scotland or France,
perhaps having hardly ever before been across the Irish Sea or the Channel.
Families worry whether the students will ever want to come home …
On going across the water to university
Clodagh Hayes
It’s July 1980 and my father is driving our battered Peugeot 505 along a narrow French country road, sunflowers in full bloom on one side and a lazy spray of water dousing the corn on the other. It’s our first foreign holiday, my mother eventually demanding a reprieve from yet another rainy holiday in Kerry with five young children. I’ve navigated our way from Cherbourg to this sun stroked corner of southwest France – not Brittany, as the weather is too like home, and not the South of France, as that is too far and too expensive – using an A3 map of France, thrilled at the sound of the unfamiliar names in my mouth. After a year of French at secondary school, I’m convinced I’m fluent. The map fizzles out as we try to find the small gite we’ve – somehow – rented from a farmer. We reach a crossroads and I’m stumped. My father stops the car and we wait for inspiration.
‘We’ll ask that man there.’ My father points at an ancient man idling on the verge, his face creased with wrinkles. A brief argument ensues about who should instigate the conversation. Everything I learned over the last year has fled my mind so it’s my mother who reluctantly opens the window and summons a few words of French from her schooldays.
‘Anglais?’ says the man.
‘Irlandais,’ all seven of us shout in response.
‘Ah!’ The eyes crinkle as he smiles. ‘Du Nord ou du Sud?’
‘Du Nord,’ says my mother.
‘Catholique ou Protestant?’ persists the man.
‘Catholique,’ we proclaim, finally a word we understand.
‘Catholique,’ confirms the man as he mimics pulling out a gun and makes a ‘rat-tat-tat’ sound. We nod in horrified agreement before he cackles and waves us off up the road to our destination.
A first salutary lesson in how our world is perceived from the outside.
Six years later, I’m off to study law at university in London, desperate to leave a place that will take me years of unenforced exile to appreciate its beauty and its tug on my heart. My schoolteachers positively discourage me from abandoning ‘the North’, viewing my desire to go to England as tantamount to treason. At the time, I disagree and plough through the UCCA handbook and various application processes to find a course that would give me two years of studies in London and two in Paris with a joint degree at the end. Who could resist that? Now, I wonder whether it isn’t the initial departure that is the treason but the failure to return and contribute my newfound, if shaky, expertise to the rock from which I was hewn.
I arrive in Heathrow in 1986 with a large suitcase and a tube ticket to South Kensington from where I take a taxi to my halls of residence on the King’s Road in Chelsea. My heart is full of excitement, glamour and fear. I’m desperate to cast off the shackles of what I foolishly consider to be a provincial upbringing, eager – too eager – to assimilate, to reinvent myself.
It’s not an easy time to be Irish in England. Two months earlier, a 20lb bomb exploded at Westminster Hall and the British public are both bored by and scared of Irish people in general and Catholics in particular. I have to stop myself raising my arms to be searched every time I enter a shop. When shop assistants feign not to understand me, I moderate my accent beyond all recognition so that by the time I return home for Christmas, I sound like a minor member of the British royal family and am rightly and royally teased for it.
My lectures and tutorials are full of polished, confident, posh students, or so they seem to me. How do they know so much already? How can they sound so fluent and knowledgeable on subjects of which I’ve only begun to scratch the surface? Then, our Constitutional law lecturer – Simon Lee – leads a discussion on human rights in Northern Ireland in one of our seminars.
It has never occurred to me that the part of the world I’m from would be covered in an English law course. I’d spent part of the summer – thanks to my father – working for Dr (now Professor) Chris McCrudden at the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights in Belfast, helping proofread a report he was preparing. I’d even read the report and tried to understand the arguments he was making. And now, one of my fellow students, a confident English public-school boy is discussing the equality legislation in Northern Ireland with great authority. I listen, impressed by his command of the subject, awed by his plummy voice into believing he is right. Simon Lee starts to question him, pulling on the threads of his argument and it’s then I really listen. I realise that what my fellow student is saying is – if not arrant nonsense – not entirely correct based on my actual (if basic) knowledge of what he is talking about. He’s mangling several concepts and, in reality, not saying very much at all. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I don’t interrupt but I resolve in future to listen to what someone says rather than how they say it. It gives me the confidence to believe that I too might have something to add to the debate, a confidence that later helps me in my legal career in the City, faced with investment bankers whose level of self-belief matches that of my fellow student of Constitutional law.
Over the years, London becomes my residence, the place where I feel comfortable although I still refer to County Down as ‘home’. When I return for visits, I no longer yearn to leave. I consider ways to move back, maybe to Dublin, maybe Belfast. But it never happens. Life gets in the way. I cry with happiness when the Good Friday Agreement is overwhelmingly approved, though I no longer get a vote. Years later, in 2016, I rage with anger and upset when the British population are lied to and manipulated into believing that Brexit is a wonderful idea with the betrayal of all the principles of the Good Friday Agreement barely a footnote to the spurious arguments in its favour.
I return home for Christmas in December 2025, excitement building as I watch the coastline appear from the ferry deck. I am continually staggered by the beauty of the natural landscape in which I grew up and which I blithely ignored throughout my youth. Walks in the Mourne Mountains, an icy swim in Strangford on New Year’s Day with seven female family members and a host of others from around the area, followed by a restorative sea food chowder at the award-winning Cuan, daily tramps along Tyrella beach, Ballyhornan and Castle Ward with my dog.
I never want to leave.
My car gets a puncture and one of the young lads at the garage is from Wiltshire, a place I know well through my husband. This lad moved to County Down ten years ago as it’s so ‘calm’ here. I am struck by his use of the word calm.
I’m on the phone to a call centre in Manchester. The woman on the phone has a northern Irish accent. I tell her I’m ‘home’ for Christmas. She sighs and says how much she misses home and wishes her husband would move with her. ‘It’s so much calmer there.’ That word again.
I meet our old neighbour at the swim on New Year’s Day. He too is back ‘home’ from England for Christmas with his English girlfriend. She loves being here and cannot believe this is the place she’s heard about for years so negatively on the news. Even my English husband obsessively scans the Ulster property websites for houses with a sea view after our windswept walks on an empty beach.
Maybe it’s a case of absence making the heart grow fonder.
I know the situation is far from perfect for many. Poverty and lack of opportunities are rife in many areas of the north of Ireland with increasing disparity of opportunity and social and economic well-being between those on higher incomes and those in social housing and/or with disabilities. Public services are often floundering through lack of long-term insight and investment. Some of the nastiness of politics on what we madly used to call ‘the mainland’ is spreading here, the perennial hatred and distrust of ‘others’ expanding beyond the traditional sectarian divides.
But there are signs of hope too – a renewed interest in the Irish language (I’m striving and still struggling!) and our heritage; an explosion of talent from the north of Ireland on stage, screen and literature; plans to turn the borderlands into a Unesco ‘region of literature’; a celebration of our wonderful natural produce with exciting new restaurants opening alongside the old stalwarts who’ve weathered the years with pluck and ingenuity; a big rise in science and innovation funding over the last five years with a booming Life and Health Sciences innovation sector taking advantage of our ability to trade goods freely with both GB and EU; and two female leaders in Stormont from either side of the political and religious divide who up until the last fortnight seemed to be working reasonably well together, treating each other with respect and dignity even when they disagreed.
Maybe our edges are softening as they harden elsewhere in the world.
Maybe this is time to return.
