Irish emigrants past: “We’d come to build; to build this country for you.”

Great feature piece in the Guardian at the weekend, with a group of earlier reluctant emigrants from Ireland to Britain…

….mostly they want to talk about work. Even Tom Coffey, who is otherwise very quiet and subdued, is voluble in his descriptions of work: “It was 14ft wide and 16ft deep. Yes. What a trench it was. Outside Southampton. It was the length of this room anyway. It was a trench for the fixed gas mains underneath it. They had that bridge down the road in about an hour, reopened the road in an hour. That was 35 years ago.” I ask Tom what stories he’d heard about England before he’d come here. “Not good ones anyway,” he says. So why did he come? “There was nothing for me there,” he says softly.

It’s all part of a documentary charting the return of working men after a lifetime in England:

YouTube video

We are reader supported. Donate to keep Slugger lit!

For over 20 years, Slugger has been an independent place for debate and new ideas. We have published over 40,000 posts and over one and a half million comments on the site. Each month we have over 70,000 readers. All this we have accomplished with only volunteers we have never had any paid staff.

Slugger does not receive any funding, and we respect our readers, so we will never run intrusive ads or sponsored posts. Instead, we are reader-supported. Help us keep Slugger independent by becoming a friend of Slugger. While we run a tight ship and no one gets paid to write, we need money to help us cover our costs.

If you like what we do, we are asking you to consider giving a monthly donation of any amount, or you can give a one-off donation. Any amount is appreciated.