Book Review: ‘London Irish Fictions’ (Tony Murray)

London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity

by Tony Murray (Liverpool University Press) £19.76  http://tinyurl.com/jw8rw39

This is a book about Migration in which the author explores memoir and autobiography to demonstrate his thesis that the telling of stories creates its own form of “narrative diasporic space” and the reconfiguring of identity. The book is divided into three sections: The Mail-Boat Generation, The Ryanair Generation and The Second Generation.

In ‘Escape and its Discontent’, Murray offers an insightful interpretation of Edna O’Brien’s discourse on mother and nationhood which underpins many of her characterisations and allows us to appreciate the loss of identity that can occur through the conflation of escape and exile. This theme is developed further in ‘Departures and Returns’ where the novels of John McGahern are examined. Murray shows how McGahern illuminates migration in psychological ways as well as socio-economic ones. He discusses the emotional dynamics of the diaspora as played out in letters, family dramas and hauntings.

The chapter on ‘Ersatz Exiles’ highlights inter-ethnic discourses referencing Bronwen Walter’s work and skilfully uses texts to illustrate issues of self-parody, Irishry and deliberate mythologization. The chapter entitled ‘Gendered Entanglements’ explores the fiction of Margaret Mulvihill with regard to contested alliances around ethnicity, gender, class and religion. In particular how the author is emotionally bound to the cultural narratives of her past and her lack of self-confidence in her national identity within the 1980s anti-Irish prejudice common in London. Her novel ‘Low Overheads’ examines the volatile social implications of an unwanted pregnancy, especially fraught in Ireland at this time. Another feature to this novel is the backdrop of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the interaction with English people with little or no knowledge of the shared history.

There is a marked shift in the fiction examined in ‘Ex-Pat Pastiche’ best summed-up by a heightening perception following abuses of the Terrorist Act, the Hunger Strikes and the increased political awareness of the London Irish – as portrayed through Joseph O’Connor and Robert McLiam Wilson’s characters with their postcolonial and intra-ethnic references and attempts to find a multi-dimensional identity in keeping with their generations instincts and sensibilities.

In ‘Transit and Transgression’, Murray refers to Mary Robinson’s inaugural speech which he suggests contributed to the emergence of increasing numbers of Irish female writers. Through the writings of Emma Donoghue and Sara Berkley, he highlights a sense of “provisionalism” in which identity is constantly shifting and challenged. In ‘Going Back’, Donoghue explores how exile occurs both internally and externally through a “queered sense of self” alongside a fundamental sense of alienation from her nationality and mono-cultural categorisations. Sara Berkley’s ‘The Swimmer’ tells of the irreversible psychological journey that has been taken to escape emotional damage but by becoming a migrant she is held in a form of suspension, ambivalence and uncertainty. Both women are caught in a “diasporic limbo”.

Part III of the book examines how second generation Irish children negotiated and incorporated, or not, their dual-cultural backgrounds where language, accent and religion are central and memory and imagination become porous.

This is a scholarly book with many sensitive insights and reflections.

Sarah Strong

Lest we forget: Three Anniversaries

2014 is the 30^th anniversary of two tragic events: the death in childbirth of 15-year-old Anne Lovett, and the infamous Kerry Babies Case. Both occurred in the shadow of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution which passed into law in January 1983 and placed the life of the unborn, from the moment of conception, on a par with the life of the mother.

 

Eileen Flynn

A third event – the decision by an unfair dismissals tribunal in February 1984, that the sacking of school teacher Eileen Flynn by Catholic secondary School in New Ross, Co. Wexford was not unfair – raised troubling questions about the condition of women in Irish society. Eileen had been sacked because she was pregnant, unmarried, and living with a separated man  and higher courts upheld the sacking the following year.  See  http://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/1985/1.html

 

Anne Lovatt

On 31^st January 1984, on a moss-covered stone at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary outside Granard, Co. Longford in the Republic of Ireland, Anne Lovett lay dying alone beside her dead baby. Anne was moved to hospital, but did not survive. In a small town like Granard, although they initially claimed otherwise, it seems that everyone knew that Anne was pregnant: her family, her classmates, the teachers in the Convent of Mercy School, as well as the town folk. Nobody chose to intervene, not even the Gardai who should, by rights, have searched for the man or boy responsible for having sexual intercourse with an under-age schoolgirl. Nobody chose to intervene, it would seem, because to do so would interfere in family matters. After all, it is the family, not the individual, which is the basic unit of society enshrined in the Constitution of the Irish Republic.

 

The Kerry Babies

Thirty years ago in April, 1984, Joanne Hayes gave birth at the family farm in Abbeydorney, Co. Kerry, again in the Republic. The child did not survive. Joanne was unmarried and this was her third pregnancy. She was in a relationship with a married man who, being something of a stud, became known locally as ‘Shergar’ after the famous racehorse turned stud kidnapped in 1981 by masked men, said by some to be members of the IRA in pursuit of ransom. Joanne, of course, was not lauded for her fecundity but labelled ‘murdereress’ and ‘slut’ and a lot worse. She was charged with murder (later dropped) and forced to endure an 82-day all-male staffed Tribunal set up by the Irish state in the town of Tralee which took on the aura of the infamous witch trials in Salem, Alabama in 1692/3. If that wasn’t enough, Joanne was also charged with killing another baby with stab wounds to the heart which washed up on the beach near Caherciveen, Co. Kerry. Forensic evidence later found that Joanne was not the mother of the Caherciveen baby.  [Irish Times Journalist, Nell McCafferty wrote ‘A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case’  [ISBN 13: 978-1855942134], £9.50 PB.  Kindle £5.56.