Oral history project explores lives of those who moved to find fortune or just to escape ‘over the water’
Last modified on Tue 31 Oct 2023 15.16 CET, taking the boat from Dublin without a backward glance. Home had been a remote Irish-speaking corner of County Galway, “10 miles from the nearest shop”, where Duggan, his parents and 10 siblings shared a tiny, three-room cottage on a smallholding up a mountain.
Though he spoke barely a word of English, on arriving in London Duggan picked up work for the following morning on a construction site. But what he would find was a level of abuse and exploitation that was almost worse than back home. For up to 12 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, “we were concreting all day, 400 metres per day – that had to be done,” says Duggan. Breaks were rare and safety equipment was unheard of.
More than 100 people, Irish immigrants and second generation Irish, have been interviewed so far for an academic archive that will be permanently housed at London Metropolitan University after the exhibition concludes.One interviewee, Rosemary Adaser, experienced years of trauma as a mixed-race child brought up in one of Ireland’s notorious industrial institutions.
Another interviewee, Breda Power, describes growing up in London where she avoided talking about her father, who only a few friends knew was Billy Power, one of the. He and five others had been wrongly jailed for the IRA pub bombings in 1974, in one of Britain’s most egregious miscarriages of justice. “People, even to this day, say, ‘You were always very private. You didn’t say too much about … anything,’” she says. “But was just avoiding conversations in general.
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