An outsider among the British: part one | Róisín Lanigan

All views expressed are that of the writer.

For a certain kind of young Irish person – namely one with ‘notions’ about themselves – there is an obvious path to adulthood. You grow up and you move to England. Specifically you move to London. That, anyway, was my plan. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to write in a place where excitement was not hard to find, and to me there was nowhere more obvious to fulfill that dream than London. I wanted, in other words, adventure.

The experience of leaving Ireland in young adulthood is, if not atavistic, then at least embedded generations deep in our culture. Have you ever heard of the joke about the Irish boomerang? It never returns, but it spends the rest of its life singing a bunch of sad songs about how much it wants to. For my ancestors repelled by famine, war, and poverty, England was not a particularly welcoming place. Employers did not want to hire Irish, and if they did they paid them badly. Guesthouses famously displayed signs in their windows reading “no dogs, no blacks, no Irish”. During the Troubles, Irish people in London in particular were subject to intense suspicion and at times overt harassment.

When I moved here, in 2014, things were more optimistic, even though the British empire was very much in its dying days. In the 100 years since the beginning of WW1, the embers of history had been replaced with a more distinctly modern kind of English patriotism. The Olympics had just been held here in 2012, and the Tour de France was just about to happen. Brick Lane opened its controversial cereal cafe (run by two men from Belfast, it should be noted). Arsenal won the FA Cup. Everyone seemed fairly happy. Things didn’t cost as much, although I still maxed out my credit cards and ruined my credit score to get here. And nobody knew anything whatsoever about Ireland.

The contemporary English person’s selective amnesia about Ireland made my lemming-like jump away from my home country feel suddenly a bit more complicated. Why did the average British person learn nothing about their own history? Why were their textbooks filled with tales of glory when every other country in the world that they touched were filled with tales of horror? And why were they so offended to learn otherwise? I had always thought I understood the English psyche, because of the cultural osmosis of growing up in Ireland surrounded by English authors, English television shows and English music.

When I got here I realised that wasn’t the case. A few months after moving I watched my office fall into a two minute silence for Remembrance Day, and suddenly the cultural gap between where I started out and where I’d ended up felt decidedly more vast than a 55-minute Aer Lingus flight. I was baffled that they cared enough to carry out this tradition. They were baffled that I wanted nothing to do with it.

Things have changed in the decade or so since that November. Nowadays British people know a lot about Ireland. Or at least they feel they do. Because nowadays there is no easier way to communicate a kind of countercultural coolness than to do so through the medium of Irishness. The Green Wave has had London in a chokehold for the past while. You can’t move in Soho without bumping into a Fontaines DC t-shirt. Kneecap played one of their biggest gigs on my doorstep in Finsbury Park. Everyone drinks Guinness, unless they prefer to drink Beamish. People like Claddagh earrings, CMAT, Cillian Murphy, spice bags, Tayto crisps, Paul Mescal, Derry Girls, Sally Rooney, Pellador and paddywhackery. If they don’t like these things they at least pretend otherwise for the sake of cultural cachet. This should be a good thing, I suppose.

This should be a salve to the fact that everything else in London over the past decade has become steadily worse. Rent, food and everything else connected to the so-called cost of living has risen exponentially. Britain elected to leave the EU, which has directly contributed to these higher costs, and to the rise of xenophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric which has seized hold of pockets of England and government. Last year British patriots began painting their roundabouts to look like the St George’s Cross. But if I’d known it was going to end up like this, perhaps I wouldn’t have bothered coming in the first place. I’d have stayed home, where people still hang Union Jacks from their lampposts but at least the rent is cheaper.

Britain’s spate of flagshaggery was telling, though. Britain doesn’t know its place in the world anymore, and it's panicking about it, and lashing out. Things are less positive. Everyone is poorer and they’re angrier about it. They blame outsiders for this fate. As someone who still lives here and has never stopped feeling like an outsider, it’s a particularly odd experience.

I like the part of London I live in. I like my friends and the family I have built here. I like that living here has allowed me to fulfill the sense of adventure I wanted, and to get paid to do the thing I love. But I don’t like Britain, and I never have, and British people struggle with this. They think if you come here you should love here, or at least be grateful.

My politics, like the politics of any Irish person hidden by the Green Wave, do not fit in with notions of British tradition or empire. I think I could live here for the rest of my life, have children here and die here, and still see myself as separate, as a part of the diaspora. I don’t think this is a particularly sad outcome. I don’t wish to lose my Irishness, even if my Irishness is inextricably tied to the diasporic experience. For a long time I didn’t want to leave either. The life I built was here, along with many of the people I love.

But you can put as many years and relationships and pints of Guinness as you want into your experience of living in England, I’ve learned. It doesn’t mean that you’ll ever really be a part of it.