Oral history project explores lives of those who moved to find fortune or just to escape ‘over the water’
It was the late 1970s when Bartley Duggan fled to London from the west of Ireland, 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.
Teachers and priests were sadistic, and the poverty was grinding and inescapable: “It wasn’t all lovey-dovey, so it wasn’t,” he recalls. In England, however, he had been told there was plenty of work. So Duggan packed a bag, cut his ties and though he is now 66, he has never been back.
Look Back to Look Forward: 50 Years of the Irish in Britain is online and at the London Irish Cultural Centre from 1 November, and touring to Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham.
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