L17-SG3 Eleanor Keen

I think that should be it running now, so you can hear me okay?

Yes, I can hear you grand.

And I can hear you, okay, so I think everything should be fine, alright, oh [laughs] you’ve gone again [extended pause].

Right, there we go, that should be working now.

Okay, sorry [laughs].

No, no, that’s, that was my fault, that’s me trying to move everything about, so it’s in, in a fairly sensible position, so you can actually hear me.

Okay, well, thanks very much for, for offering to do this first of all.

Oh you’re more than welcome. I’m, I’m quite excited to be enjoy-, to be involved in it, to be honest.

Ah, no, it’s great and, yeah, it’s a bit of a strange circumstance. I was looking forward to a trip up north, but this is, this is fine as well.

Yeah, it’s, it’s horrible today, so you’ve probably avoided having to be up here.

[laughs] It’s kind of cloudy in Brighton, but, but not, no rain.

Oh we’ve got awful weather, it’s always awful up here [laughs]. I mean that in a nice way, I love, I love Newcastle, but it’s always awful up here.

I used to live in Manchester, so I, I remember the rain there very well [laughs].

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’ll do it.

So just before we start, I know you sent through a consent form, but if you could just give your kind of verbal consent to this being recorded for the benefit of the tape, so, yes.

Yeah, is there anything specific you want me to say or–?

No, no, no, just say that you’re gra-, you’re fine with–

I, I give my full consent for this session to be recorded and everything afterwards, yeah.

That’s perfect, that’s perfect, that’s all, and then maybe just say your, your full name and today’s date.

My name’s Eleanor Keen and it’s the twelfth of June 2020.

Thank you very much, okay. So in terms of the interview itself there’s going to be kind of two main areas I suppose, so we’re going to talk about your childhood, about your parents and about your kind of identity growing up and your relationship to Northern Ireland as part of that, and then in the kind of second half it’ll be more about your life as a adult and then some more kind of reflections on your relationship to Ireland and Northern Ireland. Does that, does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, that’s fine.

And did you have questions about like, the, the sort of interview process before we start?

No, no, no, not at all. I, I, I did things like this when I was at university, so I’m, I’m quite comfortable with what we’re doing.

Oh did you, did you, you, you interviewed people?

I did, yeah, I did it, I did a sociology degree, so I did a, an awful lot of sitting, but that was with actual tape recorders cos it was 2007, 2008, but yeah [laughs], I’ve sat and done this.

So you, you know a little bit about the process then?

Yeah, with getting the consent form I had mild flashbacks to trying to do my dissertation, but apart from that, yeah [laughs].

Okay, well, that’s, that’s good. So we’ll, we’ll kind of start off chronologically, but don’t feel like you need to stick to chronology or anything like that, we can kind of move around, but, but the sort of obvious first question is where were you born?

So I was born in south-west London in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1988.

1988, same as me.

Oh yeah.

[laughs] So Kingston-upon-Thames in south-west London.

South-west London, yeah, just bordering Surrey.

Yeah, and what, what sort of a place was that?

Kingston’s, it’s a nice area, it’s, it’s very, it’s full of people who work up in London basically. It was, I grew up in Surbiton, which is just down the road from Kingston, mainline to Waterloo, it’s generally, it was full of commuters basically, fairly decent schools, nowhere particularly rough compared to obviously some areas of London [laughs], which I know well, but I didn’t grow up there, so.

And so was it, it kind of a quiet, kind of suburban–?

Very suburban, a painfully, painfully suburban part of London, yeah [laughs].

[laughs] And, and what did your parents do?

So my dad stayed at home, he, he stayed at home when I was born because my mum had the by far better job. My dad had previously been a commercial artist and truck driver and various odd jobs, my mum, however, worked in investment banking for a company called 3i up in Waterloo, so she went back to work after her maternity was up, so I stayed at home with my dad.

Okay, and obviously I’ve spoken to your mum [laughs] already, so she went back to work and your, your father stayed at home.

Yeah, he was a stay-at-home parent, yeah.

And did you have brothers and sisters?

I, I have one brother, but I didn’t grow up with him, so he was, my brother is eighteen years older than me, he’s my mum’s son, and he was adopted when he was born, he was born in 1970, but later found my mum again, so I do have a brother, but I, I grew up as an only child, it’s not complicated, but it, you know, requires some explanation.

[laughs] Sure, that’s quite interesting, so what, what age were you when, when–?

I, yeah, so he, he would have been eighteen when I was born and he, he discovered, well, he, he always knew he was, he always knew he was adopted, he was brought up in Newry actually, but he, he found my mum and then, I was about three or four the first time I met him, but I didn’t know who he was, I had no concept of the idea. My dad had always been well aware that Des existed and was absolutely fine with it, but I do remember my mum asking me how I felt about having a brother and me being five or so, thought it meant like, a little brother, and I said, I said I’m fine, I don’t want one, thank you, you’ve got one fully made, sorry, apologies, one exists already, but yeah, he’s always been my, there’s no, none of that half-brother or anything like that, he’s my, he’s my brother, so.

Okay, that’s, that’s an interesting dynamic I think when it’s that, that large of an age gap as well.

Yeah, I think that me being an adult, I mean, I’m thirty-two now, but it was probably wasn’t till I was about twenty or so that me and Des could actually properly sit down and be, not adults, but have proper conversation, what do you say to a five-year-old when you’re in your twenties.

Yeah.

Exact-, it’s a, but now it’s, I mean, he’s, he’s fifty now and, but it’s like, there’s no real age gap cos I think once you get to a certain age in life you can pretty much talk to anyone.

Yeah, it becomes much less important, doesn’t it.

Yeah, plus you can sit in a pub together and that always helps [laughs].

[laughs] Yeah, that’s easier than talking to a five-year-old I suppose.

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, so south-west London, only child. Where did you go to school?

So I went to the local schools, so there was Tolworth Junior School, which was the closest school to me, was there for infants and junior school, so until I was the age of eleven, did my SATs there and then I went to Tolworth Girls’ School, which was the only non-selective school for a couple of miles. I actually did, I, I passed my eleven-plus, but I didn’t want to, to go to a school like that, the onl-, the choice was a grammar school and it didn’t really fit with, with how I viewed life, so I went to Tolworth Girls’ School till, well, actually I did that until I did my GCSEs at sixteen and then I stayed on at the mixed sixth form for my A-levels as well, so many, many years there.

It’s, that’s, that’s striking you say that you, so you did the transfer test as I did I guess, we’re the same age, and, and decided that you wanted to go to the, the sort of the local school rather than the grammar school.

Yeah, I don’t think, my, my dad didn’t mind, my mum was not the best pleased that I did that, but she also, she was fighting with a miniature version of herself, so I think she realised that she wasn’t going to [laughs], she was going to get any further with that part of the conversation.

It’s interesting to me just because I, I was, I feel like I was much too passive at that age to have been able to make any kind of active decision about it. I think it was very much my parents’ decision what school I went to, at that age, I was, what, ten, eleven, so it’s quite impressive that, that you were, that you felt sufficiently strongly about it to, to–

I definitely, I get that from my dad. My dad, I know we’ll probably get into family history, but he, he grew up in a council estate in Fulham, postwar, he does not and has ingrained in me the idea that education should be free and not streamlined and I was very much that, even at that age, and I didn’t agree with the idea of a grammar school or pay fees, fee-paying schools and that’s all the choice there was because of the area I grew up in, bar the one state school, plus it, it being a girls’ school and me being that age, it was very exciting to be like, with the girls I went to primary school with and, you know, so that was, yeah.

So you, you sort of stayed together with a group of people you’d been at primary school with?

Yeah, but it was because there was, there was only one mixed school in the entire area, everything else round there was, it was boys’ schools or girls’ schools because of, because of the type of area it was, so everyone was going to that school, I wanted to go there with them and be with my friends.

Okay, that’s, that’s interesting, and maybe we should do some of the family history stuff now then, so [00:10:00] you, you mentioned your, your dad grew up in a council house, where?

He grew up in a council block in Fulham.

Fulham, so he’s, he’s from, he’s from London.

Yeah, he’s born and bred, he got as far as going to Kingston, that’s it, that’s as far as he ever managed to get out of London, yeah. So he was in a place called Lancaster Court, which sadly isn’t there anymore, but it was, it’s not the Fulham you now, know now, obviously it was, it was, he was born 1950, there was still rationing when he was born, it was very much the Fulham that you used to see in pictures with the burnt-out buildings, nothing was rebuilt after the postwar, very, very working-class upbringing.

But, but kind of a, a strong kind of positive working-class identity, it sounds like as well.

Yes, yeah, yeah, my dad was very, and, I mean, he got in-, he was very, he’s what you’d probably term a bit of a hippy as well, given that he grew up in that period of time, came into his adulthood in the sixties and seventies, so, but yeah, he, he’s very, very working-class identity, but not your traditional flag-waving, I’ve got a bulldog working-class identity, a very hippy-based working-class identity, yeah, more, more on the socialist side than the nationalistic side, I think is probably the better way of putting it.

Yes, that, that makes sense, and I think I know a little bit about the kind of hippy stuff from having spoken, spoken with your, with your mum, and so your mum was born in Derry?

Yes, yeah, she was born in Derry in 1953, alongside, how many of them are there, there’s six of them and she’s number four of them all, yeah, so five sisters and one brother, who was the youngest, so bless Johnny cos he got richly destroyed by his five older sisters for the majority of his life [laughs], which I always feel really sorry for him for, but yeah, she was, she was born there, like I said, in 1953 and, yeah, went to school and so on and so forth, left in 1971, ’72, ’72 I think, around then.

Yeah, and, and moved to London.

Yeah, with her sister Ellen.

Yeah, that’s right, they moved together, and eventually met, met your dad.

My dad was my mum’s landlord [laughs], which I’m not sure, she may not have told you that, but yeah, my, there was nothing, nothing untoward, they, they genuinely just met through that and, you know, that was, the rest is history. It baffles me that people these days can be together that long and that’s not a slight on anyone, but, you know, so I’ve had a, a parent, they were, they were together for thirteen years before they even got married, so they’ve been together since nineteen-, well, God knows, forty-odd years now.

Wow.

Yeah, which is–

It’s amazing.

It’s fair play to them [laughs].

[laughs] And I suppose I’m interested in, what age would you have been when you had a sense of your, of your mum as, as say, having a different accent from–?

So I have no idea my mum has an accent.

Oh that’s, that’s interesting.

I’ll, I’ll ex-, yeah, I’ll explain that. I am aware that she has one, cos people tell me that she has one, I can hear it when I talk to her sisters and Johnny, I can hear it when I talk to my brother, I can hear it when I talk to any other member of my family, but in my ears my mum sounds like everyone else I grew up with. There are times, she’ll come out with a phrase, a particularly Derry phrase that I’m like, I can hear the accent there, but I just hear her like I hear everyone else, and I think it’s cos I’ve heard it from the second I was born.

That’s so interesting, it make-, it makes sense if you’re so used to it, you don’t, you kind of convert it into–

Yeah, the flipside of it is though if, if, and I used to have this when I went over, we went over to Derry and Donegal a lot as a child, if I’m in a shop and I hear a tone that sounds like my mum, I’ll, I’ll turn cos I think it’s her, which obviously if you’re in a shopping centre in Derry is every other word I could hear [laughs], but it’s the only reference point I have for that’s my mum’s voice as opposed to that’s my mum’s accent.

Sure [laughs].

It, it can get very confusing very quickly.

[laughs] And so you, you were saying that you went to Derry and Donegal quite a lot as a, as a child.

Yeah, we went, so if we didn’t go away somewhere for holidays, we went to, it was always split, so we would go to Derry for, say, half a week and then we’d end up in, in Donegal, pretty much the whole of Donegal, I, I don’t think there’s a place in Donegal I haven’t been over the years. My dad loved Ireland, he’d, we’d bring the car, we’d go over to, up to Wales and, and, or up to Scotland, sorry, and go across on the ferry, my dad loved it as well, so it was lots of, lots of days getting lost around Donegal and up Errigal and going to everywhere pretty much around Donegal.

And what were your, do you remember your kind of first impressions of, of either Derry or Donegal, as a child?

Derry, Derry I remember being very slate grey, partially because we stayed at my uncle’s house and he, I don’t, I know that like, having been back as an adult I know that it is quite grey in terms of the buildings cos of the slate that’s used, but that’s just the picture that I had in my head and it’s not grey as in I associate it with anything bad, partially cos it was usually raining and like, all my childhood holiday photos from the summer are me in a, in a raincoat and a scarf [laughs], but I remember Donegal just being green, very, very, very, very green, and for someone who grew up, even in suburban London, there’s not a lot of green in suburban London compared to then suddenly being put in the middle of Donegal and it being nothing but green and then heather and everything else that comes with it, so, but yeah, it was, pretty much just spent my life going round there in the, in the summer, which was lovely.

And did you, so did you see your mum’s family in Derry?

Yeah, so we, she had one brother who still lived there, which was Johnny, her sister Ellen had then moved to, or lived in Dublin, and the others are scattered around the globe. She has two sisters in Canada, who we did go and see quite a lot if we could, and then one sister who lives in London, who I saw obviously a lot more than, than other ones, but we would, we would go to Dublin sometimes, but usually if my mum came over her sister would come up to Donegal and Derry and they’d spend a lot of time just going round where they grew up basically, cos my, my grandfather as far as I’m aware, I could be wrong, he, he’s, he was from Derry, but my grandmother was from, oh no, he was from Moville, my grandmother was from Buncrana.

Oh from Moville, I know [laughs], I know, I know where Moville is.

Yeah, but I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been to Moville in my life [laughs], yeah, cos there was, that’s where they spent their, their summer holidays as, as a family.

Ah sure, of course, yeah.

So we always went there and went to the ice-cream shop, Fiorentini’s, which isn’t there anymore, sadly.

Ah my–

We went back two years ago and it wasn’t there.

My parents have got a sort of holiday home in Culdaff.

Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I spent a lot of my childhood in [laughs], the sort of west coast of Ireland.

It’s not a bad place to spend time at all, it’s, it’s stunningly beautiful, but if it wasn’t there we were in, where were we, I can’t even remember the name of it now, I’m trying to think, off the top of my head, it was along the coast.

Greencastle?

No, I’ll remember, I’ll remember [laughs], you’ll see, it’ll come to me.

But, so as a child what, what was your kind of sense of like, did you feel like your mum was going home, did you feel any kind of like, connection to Ireland beyond a kind of a summer you went to holiday or–?

Yeah, she’d, she’d always get very excited when we were going back and it was, she’d get excited about going to Derry, but she’d get more excited about going to Donegal, purely because I know when she was a child her dad’s job was a pharmacist, he would, he would drive around and deliver the medicines, and so she was taken round in a car with all her sisters, all around Donegal, all the time, going up Mamore Gap was always a thing we did every single time cos she’s been doing that since she was, you know, young enough to remember herself and we always did it as well, and I think because my mum and my dad had gone many, many years previous to me being born, my dad felt at home there like, he knew where he was, he, he, well, you can’t quite know the roads of Donegal because–

Nobody, nobody does [laughs].

Yeah, nearly impossible, but he would, you know, he’d recognise landmarks and he’d been to, to Grianan loads of times, and so, so because he, he was comfortable there, I was comfortable there, it wasn’t new for both of us.

It sounds almost like a kind of a home away from home or something.

Yeah, pretty much, and I, I was very aware of the fact that this is, we go to the house that her, her, you know, they go to at summers and sometimes my aunt Patricia who grew up in, just along the coast, along Moville, sometimes she’d be there for the summer, so we’d go and pop and see her, but she lived in the Isle of, the Isle of Dogs, so I was used to seeing her in London and then I’d see her there, so I was very aware of the fact that, you know, this is where my family is, one side of my family is from and I’ll bump into random people. I, I remember bumping into my mum’s, what’s the word I’m looking for [pauses], god-, godfather, randomly in Moville one day, and my mum was like, oh by the way this is your god-, this is my godfather, so yeah, very aware of the fact that that’s where family was from.

Yeah, so you really have a sense of like, strong connections there.

Yeah.

Yeah, and did your dad have a, a big family in London?

He had two brothers that both, one had moved to just near Reading at that point and the others were still in Putney, so if it, [00:20:00] you know, I’d, I had, I have some sort of feeling around Putney as well because, you know, that, that’s where, that’s where my cousins were from and they were the closest to me in age and closest to me in, in, you know, gap, distance and stuff, so I spent a lot of time with them, but then they moved down to Bournemouth I think in 2004, so that changed things around a little bit.

Yeah, that’s, that’s a bit of a trip.

Yeah.

[laughs] So thinking now about, I’m trying to think, if you were born in ’88 you’re the same age as me, so do you have any memories of the conflict or–?

Yes, though I’m not sure, well, I do, I know, obviously when my mum’s telling me about her experiences in it, I’m very aware of the fact that that isn’t the stuff I remember.

Well, so there’s sort of two things to talk about there actually, so I’m interested in what your mum tells you, but I’m also interested in like, you as a child travelling over there, do you have any kind of–?

I do remember being in Derry and seeing people with, soldiers, not soldiers, police essentially, and some soldiers, with guns on their hips, which is quite a weird one because when we, obviously they don’t, they don’t tend to arm their, or they didn’t tend to arm the police in the UK, but I do remember after the, the, whenever there was, was an attack you’d see police with guns on the street and it would weird out a lot of my friends and to me it, it wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen it.

I understand.

It, it, yeah, it, yeah, it, it wasn’t, it was a sort of sense of familiarity to it because I’d spent so many time over there and I, I had an idea as to why, even as a young child, cos I, I do know that I had some of it explained to me, and I, I do remember seeing, you know, a lot of the graffiti and a lot of the, everything that came, you know, was a side effect of, of the Troubles, but I do know, I knew when we were in Donegal we were, we weren’t near that.

No.

If that makes sense, yeah [laughs].

No, sure.

I knew that once we’d come out and we’d gone across the border, but I also do remember there being a border as opposed to being able to just drive across it now, I do remember, yeah, having to, my mum being very, very cautious, she always had been, having an, an English husband, but now she had a little English child as well and, you know, so on and so forth and everything that comes with it. She would tend to talk if we went across the border to the South, my dad would tend to talk if we went across the border to the North.

[laughs] Because they–

Yeah, cos it seemed, it worked that well to get across and there’d be less issues.

That’s interesting and, yeah, you remember having, there, there’s some kind of aspect of the conflict explained to you as a child, it’s kind of a difficult thing I think to explain to your sort of young, sort of English child, this kind of complicated thing.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, I, I don’t, my mum never sat down and talked to me about it in terms of that, but she would mention stories and vaguely explain it to me and I, I think as I got older I looked into it myself, I like, history’s my thing anyway, so I, I ended up looking into it and learning a lot more about it, to the point where when I did my A-levels in history we did a question, we did the Irish question, we did the history of the Liberal, the Liberal government and that was folded in, and I do remember my history teacher, because my mum was, was involved with the school, asking me if I was, you know, comfortable with it and, you know, everything that came with that, cos she knew that my, my mum was from, you know, one of the flashpoints of it, but I was fine with it, but it, you know, it, it definitely, as part of my identity or as part of my knowledge that people knew I had, went beyond just what, you know, my mum had told me, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it’s a more, a more personal knowledge I guess.

Yeah, yeah, they were going to be talking about the, you know, the start of the conflict that my mum lived through part of, so, you know, I get why a teacher, and I thank her for it, would sit down and go, you know, if you don’t want to listen to some of this I understand, or, you know, everything that comes with it.

Yeah, no, maybe, it makes some of what are, what are already quite difficult stories maybe even more difficult to, to talk about, so yeah, so maybe, maybe to talk about that then, so your mum, what, what age would you have been when you would have talked to your mum kind of properly about her childhood and about growing up in Northern Ireland?

Pretty much as soon as she could tell me about it, so even in bits and pieces and I, I do remember when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, I would have been ten and I remember.

Yeah, ninety-, ’98, right?

Yeah, I remember my mum being ecstatic. I remember her being so hopeful that it was, you know, something was going to change and I, because being ten years old I was, I was definitely old enough to understand and I had known the stories, I may not have fully understand, you know, I don’t think anyone fully understands the conflict to, to the finer, finer points, yeah.

No [laughs], no.

But at that point I’d, I’d already heard stories of what she’d been a part of, what, kind of why she left and everything that came with it, so I do remember understanding the Good Friday Agreement a lot more than people I went to school with, to them it was just oh the, the American president’s gone to Ireland, that was the story, but to me I remember thinking no, this is something important to the people I care about and therefore wanting to know more about it and asking her right, why are you so happy and her explaining it as best she could to a ten-year-old.

That’s really interesting, and it’s interesting that you would have felt that sense of, of like, slight difference from other people in the school who maybe just saw it as, yeah, like you say, Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton’s in, in Ireland which, you know, American presidents didn’t tend to come over here then, well, they still don’t really, but yeah.

No, it was, it was a big deal, I mean, I remember it living in Northern Ireland even, one of the things that was a big deal was that Bill Clinton was here.

Yeah, and it, I mean, it was, it was, well, it obviously made the papers for different reasons, but when you’re ten you just know that Bill Clinton’s across the water [laughs], yeah.

Thinking about school then as well, were there other kind of Irish–?

No, no, not in my primary school, funnily enough in my, so there was none in my primary school, none in my secondary school, in my, at my sixth form, so the college education, but it was a mixed sixth form, I met my friend Owen who is my, one of my closest friends in the world, he, his, his dad is Irish and his mum is English and we met my friend Matt, his, his dad’s from Kerry, and my friend Matt whose, whose dad is also Irish from somewhere south, I didn’t know Matt quite as well, but his mum was English and it was weird that the three of us graduated, gradu-, like, sort of graduated towards each other–

Yeah, yeah.

As the sort of half this, half that and because I think, because both their parents were Southern Irish, they had a, a very different view on, you know, and at that time it was getting very fashionable to be, you know, of Irish extraction or to have some sort of Irishness in you.

That’s interesting.

So, and actually because of Owen, I like, I’d always followed rugby and watched rugby, but Owen is a London Irish supporter and because of him I am now also, again, I’ve been, I’ve known him since 2004, so it’s been a bit longer [laughs], but I, I watched national rugby, I didn’t tend to watch domestic rugby and then as soon as he was like, London Irish, I was like, that makes like, okay, yeah, no, I like that, that, I feel some connection to that, yeah, watched them get relegated and promoted and relegated and promoted the last couple of seasons, so that was definitely worth following them [laughs].

[laughs] That’s interesting that rugby’s one of the kind of sites for like, identity. So would your mum have watched the, the Irish rugby team, the national rugby?

Yes, my mum watches the international, she is not a huge fan of watching them lose, so she’ll only watch them on the years that they’re doing well in the Six Nations or the World Cup [laughs], my dad has, has, does watch the rugby, but again, if it’s, if it’s international, it’s only international that he’ll watch, but my, my uncle Johnny and a few other members, my, our cousin George, they, they are, they watch rugby, you know, primarily, aside from any of the, the Gaelic sports, so I would always talk to them about it if I met up with them, on the rare times I did get to see them it was usually talking about rugby, albeit English or Irish domestic rugby.

Yeah, okay, so, so you were saying in secondary school, you made friends with these, these two guys, Owen and Matt?

Yeah, this was in, yeah, my, in my college, so sixth form yeah.

In your college, sixth form, sorry, yeah, the final two years, right, A-level.

Yeah, but it was, it was attached to my, my secondary school, so it was, it was separate, but it was still at the same place if that makes sense, but they had mixed sixth form.

So it was a, you were girls all the way through until A-level.

Till, yeah, till A-level, yeah.

Yeah, and just thinking about these two guys who also have this kind of Irish connection, and, and your mum as well, were you involved in any kind of like, Irish, London Irish cultural stuff?

No, I mean, we’d, we’d go to the games, there was always, you know, when St Patrick’s Day rolled around there was always an excuse to go to the pub and so on and so forth, and, and again we’d, we watched, we watched the rugby together, but in terms of it, it was just a sort of, again, I’ve always said to him it’s weird that we, we sort of graduated towards each other, but there was something about having the parent that was other, and I think it’s probably similar for people who have sort of a mixed heritage, tend to graduate towards people who have a mixed heritage and if it’s the same heritage you, you find a connection, there is a, there is a [00:30:00] running theme between us in, in that we all tended to listen to quite punky music and we all much loved, there’s a band called Flogging Molly who are–

Yes, I know, I know them [laughs].

Yeah, and every, everyone, every other band of that ilk and that always got played at parties and stuff because it was one of us putting the music on and we’d all enjoy it and have a lovely time, and there was an idea of identity to it, more so than the other parts of that genre.

That’s interesting, and, and you were saying that, that there was something kind of fashionable about a kind of Irish connection.

At that time, yeah, there was definitely, it was definitely the starting of the, of Irish being fashionable in sort of, I, I don’t know where that came from, but I know it definitely made my mum’s life a little bit easier and it, you know, it, it was, it was for a while in the, in the noughties and still now it was in fashion, well, not fashionable, but it was, you know, it was, people who were Irish were deemed to be cool, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, I, I do know what you mean.

Yeah, purely for their Irishness and that, well, you know, that’s where it came from or that’s where, yeah.

Which if you, if you think about the kind of seventies and the eighties–

Oh God, yes, yes [laughs].

Such a, such a, such a change really.

I, I do, I mean, well, I remember my mum telling me the stories when she came over with the, you know, the no blacks, no dogs, no Irish in the pubs and not being allowed in certain pubs, and to everyone she spoke to, because as soon as they found out she was Northern Irish, cos an English person can’t differentiate the accents, suddenly she was also, not only was she, you know, Irish, so the sin of that, but also because she was Northern Irish she therefore must be about to plant a car bomb, had comments made to her, stuff like that, and then suddenly, suddenly it was cool and it was a very weird turnaround in my head, cos I remember people making comments to her when she was younger and then suddenly it was like, oh your mum’s Irish, isn’t she like, yeah, and being a bit unsure as to whether, why someone was asking me that and them being like, oh it must be great fun having an Irish mum, what, what, hang on, fif-, five years ago I would have got a very different comment about that, but I think it’s also the, the global thing is that the view of who we viewed as terrorists changed, so because of that they became the other and–

The Irish can be kind of just like, a fun–

Well, every, yeah, everyone sort of realised how much fun Irish families are and, and, you know, everything that comes with it, and stopped caring about what they decided was bad about them five years earlier.

No, it’s really interesting, and I, I suppose I’m wondering as well, there’s something in there where like, Northern Ireland specifically kind of disappears in a way.

Yeah, it stopped being, yeah, it stopped being very, a very distinct you’re Northern Irish or you’re Irish. So my mum always described herself as Irish, she never described herself as Northern Irish unless like, it was on a form where you had to describe it as Northern Irish. She always, and all of her family have always, described herself as Irish and I know why, I, I know like, the, you know, background to that, but yeah, suddenly Northern Ireland didn’t really, it was part of Ireland, to the English sensibilities anyway, so, you know, you had, you had an accent, you were Irish.

And would you have called yourself Irish at that stage?

No, but my mum’s asked me this question like, how do you identify, and I–

It’s very hard, it’s a very hard question to answer, I know.

And I’ve always said that I’m, I’m a Londoner–

Hah.

Or I’m British, it’s an, it’s an odd one, cos I have an Irish passport, and I have an Irish passport because the UK passport office was on strike, that’s as exotic as the story gets, we were [laughs] go-, we were going over to Ireland for a, a funeral for one of my great-aunts and obviously, you know, the turnaround was very quick, so my mum needed me a passport when I was about two and the passport office was on strike and she suddenly remembered that I could get an Irish passport, so down we went, cos it was, you know, early nineties, took me to the, to the embassy, got me a passport, done, and I’ve just renewed it and I, but now I renew it because it retains my EU citizenship.

Well, I was just going to say, there’s a, there’s a–

Very handy.

Practical reason to keep it now, yeah.

Yeah, and I renewed mine in 2016 before the vote and I was very lucky because obviously they ran out of forms, didn’t they.

Yeah, that’s right.

Suddenly everyone was trying to find a granny that had been [laugh], possibly been to Ireland at one point and therefore they could get a passport, but I’ve just kept, I’ve, you know, I’ve always kept it, but it does mean if I’m filling in forms and stuff I have to put my nationality as that because that’s my, that’s what I have as my, my official nationality because that’s my only form of personal ID that has my nationality on it, so it is a weird one. I, I don’t consider myself English, a hundred per cent, I, some of that’s from my dad as well though, because he is, he’s a hundred per cent English, but he, he’s also, he’s a Londoner, he doesn’t, yeah, so I have a very, it’s not confused, I’m comfortable with it, but it is a very weird half-and-half sort of, I’m, you know, I’m one half this, one half that, but I, at the root of it all I’m from London and that’s, that’s my main identity. I identify with where I was brought up more than the country that I was born in.

Yeah, that, that makes sense to me.

Yeah.

It’s kind of, I mean, it’s kind of an impossible question, it’s one of the questions we’ve been asking people, especially kind of second-generation people like yourself like, how do you identify, but like, I don’t know that I could answer that question. I’ve got an Irish and a British passport, sometimes I say Irish, sometimes I say British, sometimes I say Northern Irish, but what do I feel, I don’t know like, you just, you say things, but I don’t really know what I, what I feel, I don’t know.

Well, I think, I think if I, if, I think if I’d just been brought up in London and we hadn’t spent a lot of time in Derry and Donegal, but my mum made sure that I felt a connection to my heritage.

Mm, that’s interesting.

And so because, yeah, because of that, you know, I, there are, you know, I, I can have conversations with people who are from that part of the world about there as if I’ve grown up there, not to the extent, you know, not to, but you know what I like, I, having spent so many summers there, I know my way around, I know pubs in certain places, I know, you know, ice-cream parlours and, you know, and so that’s a very weird sort of, that was my, one big part of my childhood was being there and spending summers there, so a good month we spent there every summer if we could get over, so, or Easter or, you know, various parts, so it, it is, it’s not a bad thing though, I, I quite like having a, a sort of wishy-washy identity [laughs], cos you can, you can use it at certain times.

Yeah, it gives you a kind of expanded, expanded range, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so just, I suppose to go back to the chronology a little bit, so you, you went to this girls’ school and then you went to the sixth form college that was attached to the school and which was kind of a mixed, and did you enjoy sixth form?

Yeah, it was, I always say it was exciting to go to school with boys, I didn’t mean it, it’s not meant in that way, but yeah, after–

No, it’s kind of, it’s a big, it’s a big change, right?

Teenage, teenage girls are awful as well and I say that as someone who was one, and it was nice to not be surrounded by that cattiness that you inevitably get, having spent five years with, with the same girls, day in and day out, whilst you’re in your teenage years, which are always, you know, frenetic as it is, so that was a nice change, and I think also because, you know, being brought up by my dad, I, I’m not, I know that there’s, there were some girls who went to the girls’ school who had been brought up by their mum and were terrified of talking to, to guys, but having been brought up with my dad and, whilst he messed around with cars in the backyard and I’d go and help out and stuff that, you know, it was nice to talk to someone that wasn’t just about blue eyeshadow and straightening your hair, which was the thing in the, in the 2000s, so, not to be, not to be too this is what girls do and this is what boys do, but when you’re seventeen that is what girls do and what boys do cos you’re too terrified to do anything else–

Sure, sure.

To be, you know, part of the outlier, so.

Yeah, the sort of gender roles are still quite strict at that age.

Yeah, you, you tend to conform because you don’t want anyone to single you out as the weird one, so.

And what about being, so you were saying that you’re, you kind of think of yourself as a Londoner.

Yeah.

Was it, was it, what was it like to be in London as a kind of a teenager?

Oh it was, it was brilliant, cos my mum worked next to Waterloo, so I used to go up, you know, to see her, every Christmas we’d go up to, to meet my brother up there, cos he also lives in London and had, and had, he was living in Leicester when he, when he found my mum, but he, he lives in Tooting now.

Yeah, that’s right, yeah.

Yeah, so he, or just off Tooting, but yeah, he, so we’d go off and see him. The Embankment is my favourite place in the entire world because I just remember, or the South Bank, I just remember walking along there many, many times, going to the aquarium, going to the, I remember watching the London Eye go up, you know, that, that, to me, that part of south London is very much where I’m from, and we’d go to Fulham, and we’d go to see my nan who lived in, still around Fulham at the time, so I felt very comfortable, at least with south London, maybe not north London, although I did used to go to Camden an awful lot as a, as a little punky teenager, which is incidentally where my aunt Judith lived, my mum’s eldest sister, so she lived just off Mornington Crescent, so I, I tended to go to places where I knew I had people around me, but, you know, I still, I still when I go back to London I’m very much, I’m home as soon as I come through King’s Cross, so, that, that, as soon as I see a red bus [laughs], I know, I know I’m back home.

[laughs] Okay, and, and what did you do for your A-levels?

So I did history, biology, English literature [00:40:00] and psychology, and I did four, so I did, I kept on, because my English literature A-level was all about war poetry in nineteen-, the poetry from the First World War, primarily, and because I was doing history A-level alongside it I knew enough that I could justify to my teachers to keep doing four instead of three at that time, so that was good.

Yeah, okay, but quite a lot of work I imagine.

Yeah, I was, I was quite a studious child, I, I enjoyed it and if it, I hated school up to A-, up to A-level because I was doing things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to do chemistry, I didn’t want to do physics, but as soon as I was able to streamline it and pick things I wanted to do, doing a history degree, history degree, history A-level, things like that, I suddenly had, you know, this is what I want to learn, so I’m happy to learn it.

It makes a big difference, doesn’t it, when you’re like, I, I’ve chosen this subject rather than I’m being forced to do this subject?

Yeah, like, I want to do this, though I was meant to do a technology GCSE and I didn’t because I couldn’t see an application for it. I remember going to my head teacher and saying can I do a different, I think I wanted to do two, I did, I did two of something, oh I did, I did sociology and history, I did two humanities instead of a technology cos I couldn’t see myself ever using it, so apparently I was quite a little rambunctious thing at that age [laughs].

I’m, I’m so impressed with this capacity to, to like, demand things or choose things at that age [laughs].

I probably get it off my mum, to be honest, I’m not going to lie, I definitely get it off her.

I was going to ask actually, going back briefly to your parents, were they, so you mentioned your dad’s kind of given you a, a sense of leftism, broadly.

Yeah, well, both of them, yeah, but yeah.

Oh and your mum was involved in the, the Woodcraft, what are they called?

Yeah, she got me in that, yeah, she got me in the Woodcraft Folk.

Oh so did you, did you do that as well?

I was the reason she was there, she, she wanted me to find something that was like the Scouts, but she definitely wouldn’t, she wasn’t going to put me in something that pledged allegiance to the Queen.

Of course [laughs].

[laughs] So we found the Woodcraft and we were lucky that there was one near us and I was in that from the ages of six till, well, till I was eighteen and then I ended up helping run a kids’ group when I came up here first for university.

Oh wow.

My dad referred to it as the whittler youth, which I always enjoyed [laughs], that was him, little mocking of me and my mum going to stay in a tent somewhere in a field, he was very, very happy with that.

[laughs] That’s, that’s very funny [laughs].

Yeah, but yeah, definitely got strong left-wing leanings from both of my parents. My dad being working-class London was a, was a lifelong Labour supporter anyway.

Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask, if there was any kind of like, formal, so Labour?

Yeah, my, my dad, I think he would, well, I, I know, he’s, he’s a Labour supporter, it doesn’t even matter how bad they’re doing, he could never bring himself to vote anything other, even where, where I grew up, Kingston, is this very strong, very, very strong Liberal Democrats seat–

Is it? Huh.

It’s Ed Davey’s seat now, it’s been Ed Davey’s seat for, he lost it briefly, I’ve lost count of how many elections we’ve had in the last few years [laughs].

[laughs] Yeah, me too, me too, to be honest.

But yeah, he lost it briefly, but other than that Ed Davey’s been there since I was in school, he’s, he’s held that seat and he, the reason it’s a Liberal Democrat stronghold is because it’s a mix of the old-school Tory voters who work up in London and the new-school ones who were very much, probably the driving force behind what started the New Labour, but it was, you know, they’re sort of, and so because of that it sort of comes together to be, and I know there’s a lot of students as well cos of Kingston University, so it ends up being a Liberal Democrat stronghold, they’re very good at local government, so that, you know, that was fine, they like the, the little bits of local government, but even then my dad, even though he knew that the Lib Dems were going to get the seat, he still voted Labour, no matter what it was, he could not bring himself to vote for anyone other than the Labour Party, and my mum does as well, she, she, you know, she doesn’t identify with any of the other parties, the UK parties, but my dad was brought up, entrenched in, in old, proper old Labour.

In old Labour, yeah.

Yeah, so, start of the National Health Service and all, all that came with it.

Yeah, and it sounds like you, that kind of has had some impact on, on your own kind of politics as well.

Yeah, you’re meant to, you’re meant to rebel against your parents’ political beliefs aren’t you, but I, I definitely saw the, you know, that’s a hundred per cent my leaning, I’m, I’m very, very left wing.

Okay, that’s interesting. So four A-levels and then, did you have a plan for afterwards?

Yeah, I went to university, I was always going to go, but I tended to choose universities that were at least a hundred miles away from where I grew up [laughs].

Well, that’s, that’s funny cos you were saying you’ve got this kind of London identity.

Yeah, well, I think it’s also, I don’t know whether I get this from, from, but I definitely get it from my mum, cos, like I said, my dad managed to get about ten miles down the road, but, you know, I, I knew that she just up and left at the age of seventeen and had a lovely time doing it, so I kind of went well, I’ve got an opportunity to, to leave for three years and see the rest of the UK, cos we definitely didn’t, I definitely didn’t know the rest of the UK compared to how well I knew Ireland, for example. So I picked a few, I picked Manchester and went up and saw it and I, I didn’t feel it, and then I picked Newcastle and we came up for a view-, a viewing and I remember walking down Northumberland Street and thinking I really like this here, I really like it up here, and I, funnily enough, my mum speaks to everyone, so we’ll be at a bus stop and she talks to people, which in London, her accent lets her get away with it, but if I was to try it, it wouldn’t work because, you know, Londoners don’t talk to each other on buses.

That’s interesting, your, your mum has kept that kind of Irish or Northern Irish–

Oh yes, it’s brilliant when you’re in a queue and you’re just trying to get somewhere [laughs], but in Newcastle people talked back to her and I remember thinking okay, no, this is a friendly place, I can, I can see myself coming here, so that’s how I ended up here, in 2006, yeah, 2006, and then ended up staying and then married a local boy.

And you’re still, you’re still there, you’re still in Newcastle?

Yeah, still, still here, cos it’s, I love it up here, absolutely adore it, so.

So, so what did you study at, at university?

I studied, my official degree was sociology, but I, I know we don’t major, but I, it was a, with anthropological modules, we’d had a deal with the University of Durham, which had a very good anthropology department, that they were, I was lucky enough that they were teaching in Newcastle University for two out of the three years that I was here, so I was able to skew a lot of my modules and my dissertation to anthropology, which is probably what I would have done, but Newcastle didn’t offer an anthropology degree, it was purely a sociology degree, so.

Okay, and did you, and you enjoyed the degree, what, what did you make of it?

I, I loved it, it was part history, part sociology, part anthropology and that’s, anything like that and I’ll sit and just absorb it, great fun, great fun.

And did you do anything about Ireland or Northern Ireland as part of that?

No, there wasn’t actually anything on the, on it and I, I don’t know whether that was a conscious decision. There was an awful lot of people, students from Belfast here because it’s, it’s a direct flight–

Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know some people, yeah.

And I, yeah, I don’t know, yeah, I don’t know whether they stayed away, cos I was in the geography, politics and sociology department and I remember we could take one, either geography or political module a year, and I remember looking for things that I had some interest in and Ireland never came up, so whether that was a conscious decision from the university or whether it was, you know, there were, there were other things they wanted to cover, I don’t know, but I, I never saw anything whilst I was here that had any, I mean, I did a module on India, but nothing about Ireland at any point.

No, I, there’s actually very little university-level teaching of Northern Ireland, which I know because [laughs] I, because I teach it [laughs], around the UK, surprisingly, yeah.

We did more about Northern Ireland in my A-levels, as part of learning about the Liberal governments in the early start of the century, than I did, than I ever saw at university.

Yeah, it’s interesting, but there, but there were Northern Irish people around.

Yeah, loads. I, there was a lad called Aaron actually who, who was in one of my societies and he was from Cork originally, but had grown up in Derry, so he once went home and sent me a picture of my uncle’s chemist, cos my uncle had a MacCafferty’s chemist and he’d gone home and he was like, I found it, cos he didn’t quite believe me, cos of the accent and, you know, when I was at home people knew cos my mum was Irish, but I was just some little Londoner up in Newcastle going oh yeah, I’ve got Irish in me.

Yeah, you’re kind of a, you’re, you're kind of like, doubly displaced there cos, yeah.

[laughs] Yeah, it didn’t, didn’t work either way, but yeah, Aaron he, yeah, he, because he knew Derry well and I, he lives in London now actually, I still speak to him every now and again, but again, somehow found myself talking to someone who had experiences in that part of the world.

Yeah.

I don’t know whether I can just tell the accent from miles away and I’m like, you, I know where you’re from [laughs].

[laughs] Yeah, it’s funny how the accent kind of catches your ear.

Well, it carries over a room, it definitely, you can hear it over a crowd of people [laughs].

[laughs] Yes, that’s, that’s true, and is there a kind of an Irish community in Newcastle?

There is an Irish, there is an Irish society, so there is the Irish centre, which is smack bang in the middle of Chinatown [laughs], because they’ll put, Newcastle’s just gone this is all lovely, but we’ll just put you here, where all the different groups, but it was one of the few places that, say, during the World Cup would play the rugby, the Ir-, the Irish rugby matches, and I’ve been there to see the Six Nations a couple of times with the other half and it’s, it, my mum’s been there, I took her to see it and it does just look like an old, [00:50:00] like a generic Irish pub, and so it’s, it’s nice to be sat in there watching sports with people who are also supporting the same team, cos it’s difficult to watch, London Irish aren’t popular up here and you don’t tend to get people going to watch them, though they do, Newcastle Falcons are from up here, so there is a rugby union background up here, but you don’t tend to get people, you know, cheering on Ireland in a match against France cos no one really cares, so I’d, we’d go to the Irish centre and watch it there and it’s, it’s really good fun in there, to be honest, it’s also where you go to renew your passport cos they have the forms, so, it’s a, it’s a nice little community and they have, they have ceilidhs and they have a whole selection of things, which sadly because of the job I worked I very rarely had evenings off, but probably would have gone more if I’d had the chance, but now we’re all sat in our houses, so, can’t go anywhere.

We, we, yeah [laughs], we can’t do anything at the minute.

Yeah.

So, so I guess I’ll just ask some questions about your kind of adult life [laughs], before coming back to maybe some more kind of general reflections on, on Northern Ireland. So what did you do after you finished university?

So at the time I was working, during university, I was working in, in a pub, so my plan originally was to do a master’s and a PhD, but I graduated in 2009, when all the money in the world had run out.

Yes [laughs], I remember it well [laughs].

Yes, no one, at least not within Newcastle University, was sponsoring anyone doing anything to do with humanities. If I’d rocked up with a, with a physics degree or a maths degree or anything like that it would have been sponsored, but I could not get sponsorship to do it whatsoever. So I ended up getting full-time in the pub I was working in and then ended up working in a shop and then working in a, getting a job in a bookies, so I worked for William Hill for a few years and then moved onto Paddy Power of all places, cos they opened up up there, so now I work in the training department for Paddy Power, which is an odd one cos I now find myself in Dublin every other month.

I was going to say, yeah, and you must, you must work with Irish people as well then?

Oh yeah, yeah, continuously [laughs], so and I, I have, I do know that when we, we recently all started doing Zoom calls and obviously talking to each other, cos we have an office in London, we have an office in, in Dublin, I know that some of my other London-based colleagues have struggled with some of the accents and there’s definitely some accents that I struggle with, I, I struggle with a Cork accent or a Kerry accent, but I’m, I, because I, my cous-, my cousin George was from Dublin, so I’m, I’m okay with both, you know, north and south Dublin accents, things like that, I, I know that there’ve been times when I can see people going I can’t understand the person talking, and I’m sat there thinking thank Christ I had some sort of [laughs], you know, push into this accent as a younger person, it’s like, it’s not as bad, yeah.

You’ve got a kind of a grounding in the accent.

Yeah, I’ve got some base that I can work off to try and understand a thick accent. It’s the same with Newcastle though, to be fair, it took me years to understand people up here, so [laughs].

Yeah, Newcastle can be quite a thick accent.

Oh yes, yeah, the, the east of, east part of, sort of the Wallsend, Byker type accent, it took me, I worked in Byker for a few years and there were still times when I looked at people and thought I have no idea what you’ve just said to me, I’m so sorry [laughs].

[laughs] And why, so did you meet your other half while you were at university?

No, I met him, funnily enough working in bookies. He, when I was working for William Hill he was working for the Paddy Power round the corner and [laughs] then, you know, that was five years ago, yeah, five, five, four, no, six years ago actually, God, duh, I should probably know stuff like that, and then me working for Paddy Power was actually incidental, I didn’t move across cos he worked there, I moved across because their area manager had been asking me to come across for a while, Gary, who also funnily enough is from Northern Ireland, sorry, I just, yeah, collect people through my life, he’s from Strabane, yeah, he’s from Strabane, and, but yeah, so I ended up going across there. But I know my mum is very happy about the fact that I work for an Irish company, she’s, she, she likes that, she likes that I go over to Dublin a lot and I always go and see my aunt when I’m over there, you know, a couple of the evenings. But every time Paddy Power does something right, so, for example, obviously people have been on furlough, Paddy Power didn’t furlough its staff cos it can afford to pay its staff and it didn’t want to take any government money and it just went no, we can afford to pay you, you can all stay at home, but you’re not going to get furloughed–

Is that right?

We’re going to guarantee you, yeah, we’re going to guarantee your wage, I’m out of the shop now, but my husband still works in, he is a manager in a shop still, and he got, and he didn’t even just get his regular pay, he got his average pay for this time last year, so if there was a lot of overtime he was getting that and stuff, and every time I mention something like that to my mum, she’s like, oh it’s cos it’s an Irish company, so they treat you well, without fail, well, they treat you well, it’s an Irish company [laughs]. But it, it has meant that Paddy Power, you know, they always add, if you’ve ever seen any of their adverts, they’re always very tongue-in-cheek, you know, a lot, a lot of for the craic type stuff, and there is a sense of I get it, I understand that because that’s the sort of, you know, one half of my family are like that, so I get the tongue-in-cheek, slightly on-the-nose advertising, and they did a few things when the DUP did the thing with the Tories and had a couple of jokes and some people didn’t understand why it was, you know, why the advertising was a little bit questionable–

Risqué or whatever.

And I, yeah, and I, I found it hilarious because I understood the reference behind it, which was nice, that was very nice.

Yeah, it’s interesting that you end up working for an Irish company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, when I went for my interview I took my passport along and Gary just looked at me and went you’ve just brought this for me haven’t you and I went no, it’s genuinely my passport [laughs], I don’t have another one.

It’s the only one.

Yeah, he was like, oh aye, I’m sure, where’s your, where’s your proper one, I’m like, this is mine, I have an Irish passport.

And is your, is your partner English?

Yes, very, very.

And from, from Newcastle?

Yeah, so his, his mum’s from Nottingham, but other than that he’s full north-eastern lad, in the, in the purest terms, yeah.

And has he ever gone with you back to, not back, I shouldn’t say back to Ireland, but to Ireland?

Yes, we went, we went last year, no, 2018, we, we went over to, we went over with, we met my parents there, hired a car and did, did what I did as a child, went round everywhere, went pretty much round the entire Wild Atlantic Way, he was at, we were at Gweedore, we were at Glencolmcille, we were at Rathmullan, we stayed in, I can’t even remember where we stayed now, just off Lough Eske, so all, all around Donegal and that was lovely, really, really lovely. We were in Derry for two days and then the rest of it was around Donegal, which was very weird because he’d gone to, he’d gone on a school trip to Donegal when he was at school for some reason, I don’t know why you’d go on a, on a [laughs], school trip to Donegal, but we went to Slieve League, and I’d never been allowed to go when I was younger cos my mum’s terrified of heights and she thought I’d fall off the cliff, and we were getting there and, James is my husband’s name, and he was like, I’ve been here and that was a very weird second of, he’d been somewhere I hadn’t of a place I’d been going my entire life, that was a very weird one.

That’s strange, yeah.

So he’d been up, he’d been up the cliffs before I had.

So he’d been to Ireland before then?

Yeah, he, I don’t know why his school did a school trip to Donegal in, in what would have been the mid-2000s.

Can you get the, can you get the ferry from, no, you can’t.

No, no, you can’t, no.

No, no, so I don’t like, it’s very strange, yeah, I don’t know either.

Yeah, but it’s also, I don’t know, Donegal’s beautiful, but it doesn’t seem like somewhere you’d take a boatload of school children, you know [laughs].

There’s not a lot of distractions really.

No, but yeah, he’d, he’d been to, they’d been to Donegal for a school trip at some point, which I found baffling.

Yeah, very strange. So did, did you, did you ever consider, why did you stay in Newcastle like, did you ever consider going back to London or–?

I have many times, partially, cost of rent–

Sure, sure.

It’s not a big deal really.

Yeah, that doesn’t make any difference, so, I love it up here as well. I, I miss London, I miss the museums, I miss everything, you know, the things like, that that come with it, but it’s a beautiful part of the world up here and it’s, and it’s cheap, you know, I, I, well, I’ve been up here fourteen years now, so nearly half my life, so something’s made me stay, aside from being married, prior to that I’d already decided to stay, so.

Yeah, okay, no, it’s, it’s really interesting, I don’t, I don’t know that part of the world very well, although I’ve been to Newcastle a few times, I used to go and watch Sunderland football matches.

You a Sunderland fan?

I am [laughs].

My other half’s a Sunderland fan.

Is he, ah.

You’re in a good company here, yeah, he’s from, he’s from just south of Durham, so he was a Sunderland fan, bless, bless you, bless you all [laughs].

My grandfather, my dad’s, no, [01:00:00] yeah, my dad’s father was a social worker in Sunderland for a wee while, and so he always watched the Sunderland results when I was a kid and kind of got me watching the results as well, and then we went over to see the games a few times, so I’ve been, I’ve been to Newcastle for that, but, and then my sister lives in the north east, but yeah, I don’t know it very well.

Mmm, you went to one of the windiest parts of probably the north east, if you’ve been to the Stadium of Light [laughs].

Yeah [laughs].

It’s just [laughs], and I say that as someone who’s spent time on the west coast of Donegal and still I think Sunderland is windier than the west coast of Donegal.

The landscape is kind of similar in some ways, of the north east anyway, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, my mum’s been up before and we went round, along the borders, and along, not quite over to Carlisle, but sort of along by Clearwater and that sort of area, right along the borders and she fell in love with it because it reminds her, you go up to Hadrian’s Wall and it just, it does look like some parts of Donegal.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So she, she loves it up here and she loves the coast as well because obviously she grew up right on the coast, so for her, me being somewhere that’s on the coast, she loves coming to visit and going to Tynemouth and, you know, seeing everything that comes with it.

Absolutely. Okay, so I think maybe just some kind of questions to finish about your kind of thoughts about Northern Ireland now and your thoughts maybe about how, I mean, we’ve kind of talked about this all the way through, but how, but how your mum being from Northern Ireland has kind of affected your outlook and your view on things. So I don’t know, maybe, what did you make of the kind of Brexit moment and Northern Ireland being, what, something that I found strange as a Northern Irish person who’s been living in England for like, a decade almost, was that Northern Ireland was like, in the news and suddenly made very visible in a way that it hadn’t been before.

Having to explain to people the, the, the parliament there and everything that comes with it, it’s very complicated and I, I find myself talking to people who have no idea, because they’re too young, for example, about the Troubles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They don’t understand why it’s a flashpoint, they don’t understand why it’s, it’s such a struggle to get anything done there, when the DUP came along people had no idea who they were.

Absolutely.

And I was fully aware who the DUP are, and I have my opinions of them, and that, you know, trying to, screaming at people like, this is, this is weird, this is, you know, something’s changed here, something’s fundamentally changed. It was an odd one, I mean, I, I, obviously, like I said, I’m retaining my EU citizenship for a reason, but, I don’t know, I know that my mum found it very, she, she didn’t feel very welcome in England for a few years, and she still at times struggles with it, because she remembers when she was the other and I think, you know, Brexit has brought that back up again and has very much brought up the idea that probably the divisions in England haven’t, you know, still run fairly deep and you just need to scratch the surface to see them, and her having been a victim of those divisions growing up has definitely opened up something and I, I understand why, I, I definitely understand why and it definitely rubs off on me. I remember once being at work and [sighs] it was, a customer, a very poorly informed customer was talking to me about Northern Ireland and said something along the lines, I was like, look, my mum’s Irish, Northern Irish, so this is, you know, a bit close on the bone and he, he was like, oh but she’s Northern Irish, she’s like us, and I thought if you ever said that to her she would absolutely rip your face off [laughs], for saying that to her, but this was someone who was sure they knew what they were talking and it, I, I find it, we know more about, or we get taught more in school, especially about conflicts on the other half of the, the other side of the world than we do about one that is right next to us and primarily, as I say, as English school children, the country had a lot of involvement in.

Yeah, absolutely, that, that, that had English soldiers there for thirty years, it’s, it’s very strange that it’s not, that people don’t, people, as you say, younger people now sometimes don’t know anything about it.

No, and it, it’s, even when we took James over to the road, obviously the roads to nowhere that are all over Donegal and stuff from the Famine, I’d explained them, but then to actually see them in real life was, you know, a very different experience to someone describing what seems like this far away place, it’s a forty-minute flight away and that’s where you are.

Yeah, it’s no distance at all, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, Brexit definitely brought up a lot of divisions and I, I understand some of them and I, I get, I get it.

Yeah, and what’s your sense about the kind of political situation in, in Northern Ireland now, is it, do you follow it or–?

I follow it in so much as, it just makes me a bit sad because I, like I say, I remember my mum being over-, overjoyed with the Good Friday Agreement and I remember when the, when they charged the soldiers who were part of Bloody Sunday, cos my mum had been there.

Yes, actually that’s, that’s interesting as well cos that’s–

I remember her, yeah, I remember her just crying at the TV and she’s not a big crier about important things, she’ll cry at the small things, but she doesn’t cry about the very, very important things and stuff that actually properly affected her, you know, going, living through the Troubles, and it seemed for a while that it was sort of getting better, things were, you know, being put away and the new generation didn’t seem to care, they just wanted to, you know, be, be who they were without having all the divisions and everything that came with it, and because of the idea of there being a hard border I have spoken to my family and I’ve spoken to my mum about this, and you just sit there and think this will kill people, it will, it, it will start again and I hope it doesn’t, Christ, I hope it doesn’t, but I know that my mum’s worried about her brother still living in Derry and, you know, I try and explain the hard border to people and they’re like, it’s just a border, there’s a border there anyway, I’m like, but it’s a significant border like, it’s so symbolic, that border, of so many things that to put it back in, I, I believe will do a lot more harm than, well, I can’t see any good that it’ll do anyway.

No, no, no, and I guess, I mean, you were saying as a, as a child you passed through a border which was still kind of semi-, semi-militarised, I mean, I, I remember it as well, so it’s, you’ve got a different perspective on that than an English person who’s just seeing it as a, a line on a map I guess.

Well, they view it as like, the, the Scottish border or the Welsh border.

Yeah.

It’s, it’s, you know, it’s just, you suddenly just have a sign on the side of the road saying you are now entering Scotland and then there’s some Gaelic underneath or some Welsh underneath, it’s not that, and I know it’s not that, having experienced it and, you know, being brought up on the stories of the Troubles, but in terms of trying to talk to people about it over here or having conversations with people about it, no, it’s not a level of ignorance, it’s not wilful ignorance, it’s just that we’re, no one’s taught about it here.

No, sure, I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s an ignorance that’s forced on people, you can’t, if, if, if it’s not taught in school, you can’t expect people to–

And also we’re talking older people, to be brutally honest, they, they lived through it, it wasn’t on school, it wasn’t in the schools then because it was current.

No, and it wasn’t on TV either a lot of the time, a lot of the time the, it was censored.

Yes and, yeah, there seems to be a, a sort of, you know, a collective dissonance about it in that, well, that happens over there, but over there is, you know, you could, you could see it, if you went to some parts of Scotland like, it’s as simple as that and it, it does get me, it, it does make me sad, it does get me down because I know how much people from, or in my experience, people from there want that to be the past, with the ex-, you know, apart from the extreme outliers, no one wants to go back to that, why would you, no one does.

And I suppose thinking about Derry specifically, you’ve had the kind of Lyra McKee killing and, and the kind of unrest in Derry, it’s been quite hard to watch.

Every time something like that happens and I speak to my mum about it you can hear the, not fear, but the trepidation in her voice because it’s, it’s the whole, not again, it can’t happen again, it can’t happen to another generation, and I, I couldn’t, I get it. The, the flipside of it though, not to make it light, is when we had the 7/7 bombings, I remember, you know, I was, I was, I was in college then, so I’m more than old enough to remember it, but when we were in college, if you’d gone to the school you were given a group of year sevens to sort of mentor during the year and they were all too young to remember 9/11. Most people say 9/11 is their first terrorist, memory of a terrorist attack, for me, I don’t have memories of it but, I have stories of the ones my mum lived through, so, but I remember 7/7 and my mum couldn’t get hold with my brother and we were getting very stressed, but my mum was so calm about it, because to her, it wasn’t the norm, but she was used to not being able to get through to people if there’d been a bomb somewhere or there’d been, you know, missiles thrown or something, and it was a very calming effect cos we were all sent home from school, no one was expected to stay in for the rest of the day because we were so close [01:10:00] to it being, you know, obviously in London, with a lot of our parents working uptown, and, but she was so calm about it, she was like, Des’ll get through to us when he gets through to us like, we just have to wait, we just have to, to sit and someone will get through to us, and that, that was a very calming effect, but then when you think about it logically, that’s horrific that that’s calm, that she was.

That you were, that–

That she [laughs], she’s so used to it that she remains calm in situations like that.

And that you’ve kind of had to learn, or be forced to learn, that that’s, that capacity, yeah.

Yeah, that and when you actually, you know, sit back and look at it, that, that’s awful, but at the time, very helpful [laughs], sorry, as bizarre as that is, yeah, at the time very helpful.

No, it makes sense, and it goes back I think as well to what you were saying before about how Irishness stops being associated with terrorism because there’s a new kind of other.

Yeah, the, the other people are terrorists now, but my mum doesn’t forget, my mum doesn’t forget. It’s not she holds, she holds a grudge, she married an Englishman, and I do like mocking her every now and again about, how do you feel like, you accidentally created an English person like, you created another one [laughs], which she finds, she quite enjoys that, but she, yeah, the, the, she remembers, and I know the stories and I, I actually felt a connection with, with the, with the, what’s happening, the riots for Black Lives Matter, there’s a picture of a, a guy from the Irish, I can’t even remember the name of the, the thing he’s part of, but he’s the guy that’s protested in the, since the sixties in London, he’s from Longford originally, and it was a beautiful picture of him sat next to a young black guy and everyone’s like, oh look at this old guy, old white guy talking to this young black guy, isn’t this brilliant, and he stopped and went hang on a second, I’m more than that, and he unveiled the t-shirt that had no, no blacks, no dogs, no Irish and he was like, I, I feel this, I understand what these people are going through because I experienced it, and I know that that’s probably why my mum has those sort of views, is because she literally lived through being put down just because of who she was and where she’s from.

And that kind, that kind of discrimination and that kind of–

Yeah, and that’s what scares her about the idea of everything coming back is, she’s been on a wave of, of popularity the last fifteen years [laughs], yeah, something like that coming back is, it’s horrific, it’s awful, for an, I, for all of us.

I, I saw a picture from Seattle, from the Black Lives Matter protests in Seattle where they’ve painted a wall in the style of, you know, you are now entering Free Derry, that mural, you are now entering Free, I can’t remember the neighbourhood in Seattle, so it’s interesting how there’s a kind of resonance there.

Yeah, and I, I think there are, there are, I can see why a lot of people from Ire-, from Ireland and Northern Ireland will have some, I mean, they were part of, they were part of it, but no one, speak, not, I’m not taking anything away from the Black Lives Matter movement cos it’s, it’s, it should exist, yeah, it’s, you know, I completely agree with it, but the Irish part of that as well, the Irish were horrifically treated by the English at the same time and were trafficked and, you know, were, were taken over to the plantations in, in the Caribbean, so I, you know, people, when I talk to people about it and explain what my mum went through, the idea that that happened just next to us, to people who looked like us, they just have a different accent, it weirds them out that Irish people could’ve been treated like that because, because Irish people are cool now, you know, it’s fine, it’s just Ireland.

Sure, sure, and there’s not like, a visible marker of difference.

Yeah, yeah, until someone opens their mouth, but then everyone loves the accent, quote-unquote, so, you know, you know what I mean, it’s a very weird one, but it does feel like it’s, I do feel like it’s kind of sitting on the cusp at the moment, with regards to the hard border and everything that, that will come because of that, if it does happen.

Yeah, it’s hard to, it’s hard to, it’s hard to think about really, especially I guess in the context of the coronavirus it’s hard to think about, hard to think about anything at the minute really. So I was just, I wanted to ask one more kind of specific, practical question and then I’m going to ask a couple of kind of big, general questions, which, you know, you can kind of take how you want, but the, the practical question is that you were saying you go to Dublin quite a lot now for work, and do you like, how do you like that, is that a kind of continuous–?

I, I love Dublin, yeah, it’s, I mean, it will, it, luckily because of the pre-existing travel rules between the UK and Ireland that will exist post-Brexit, but I’m very glad that I have, like I said, that I have an EU passport cos it’ll allow me to get through much quicker, but I love Dublin and I have, I, I’d been to, I’d been to Dublin quite a lot when I was young anyway because we had an aunt there, or I had my aunt there, and I would, I, I still see her when I go over, so we meet up.

Where, where in Dublin does she live, roughly?

She lives in, and I cannot remember off the top of my head, in, I will remember.

I’m just, I used to live in Dublin, so I’m just curious, it’s [laughs]–

She’s on the, she’s on the Luas, hang on, let me get, I’ll [laughs], trying to remember off the top of my head cos I’ve had to get it before, she lives out in, what’s the Luas stop she lives off.

The north or the south?

She’s in the south.

The south, okay.

Yeah, I can’t, I can, do you know what, it’s one of those ones that I couldn’t pronounce very well, and that’s partially why, hang on, it’s in, Ranelagh, Ranelagh.

Ranelagh, Ranelagh, yeah, sure, I know, I know exactly where you are, yeah.

Yeah, she lives out there, so, I usually work in Smithfield.

Smithfield, yeah.

Yeah, cos that’s where there, there’s a Paddy Power training centre there, and so–

There’s a, Smithfield has, has changed a lot in the last few years, it’s got fancy.

Yeah, I do remember, I do remember Smithfield when I was younger cos we, I remember us coming to the brewery.

Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But having seen it when I was about twelve to going back now and going well, that’s, to be fair that was twenty years ago, but still and going oh this, yeah, okay, this is not what I remember at all, but yeah, so I spent, like I said, most of my time in Smithfield, which isn’t too far to get up to, I can get to Penneys if I’ve got a [laughs], got an afternoon off and stuff, but yeah, I just get a taxi out and see, they’ll always take me out for a, for a dinner when I’m over, cos I’m usually over for probably the better half of a week if not five days when I’m over doing training, so.

And good pu–

I, I, I like, yeah, I love it.

Good pubs in Dublin and, yeah.

Yeah, it’s, it’s not a bad place. I’ve had to go to places like Bradford for work and I would rather be staying in Smithfield [laughs] than Bradford or other parts of the, the country, so.

Sure, sure.

It’s nice, it’s good, I, I like it, I, I don’t feel like at home in Dublin, it’s definitely where I go and work, but I, having some familiarity with it and having family there definitely makes it easier to spend a couple of days away from home over there.

Okay, no, that’s, that’s great, and then some kind of general questions about I guess, it’s interesting, I mean, I don’t know how you can answer a question like this, but what effect or what impact do you think your mum’s kind of stories about, about her life in Ireland have had on you?

It, it’s definitely made me respect her an awful lot, so like, I know she was, she wasn’t part of the Battle of the Bogside, but she definitely finished her drinks quick enough so they could get the bottles out, is how she describes it, I don’t know whether she’s giving me a, a cleansed version of it or not. It definitely made me a protestor–

Okay, that’s interesting.

A hundred per cent, yeah, because she, she was out, you know, not necessarily on marches, cos she couldn’t, but she was, you know, on the periphery of them, yeah, it’s definitely, she’s very, she’s incredibly strong-minded, her, all of her family is, it’s a very strong family of women and, and Johnny, part of that comes from just who they are, but I, I know a lot of that has come from what they’ve all survived, though like, I, the only one who’s still there is, is Johnny, the rest have all fled, quite far away, but it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s definitely informed my view of what I believe to be right and wrong. It’s probably what got me interested in history, cos I had a, you know, a historian at home telling me stories about a different part of the world, and it’s definitely, it’s definitely made me, my view on how people should be treated, based on who they are and where they come from, has definitely been coloured by the stories from what my mum and her family went through growing up, a hundred per cent, and the way, not just being in Northern Ireland, but when she came to London as well, and also my view on, on, I don’t know, on the, kind of the importance of where you’re from and–

That’s interesting.

Having a connection to, so, so the flipside of it is, I don’t have children, but if I, if I do I want, if, you know, say it’s up here, I want them to know London, I want to take them back and show them the place that their parent is from, and I definitely get that from my mum, so I do get the idea of that sense of where you’re from and why you belong there, which is probably why I describe myself as a Londoner as opposed to someone, as opposed to someone who was born in a country, I am from this place.

Yeah, rather than being English or whatever, it’s like this specific placed identity, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it’s, it also, it’s informed my taste my music, it’s informed, you know, we had, we had, at the wedding there was, you know, a large Irish contingent there, there was Irish music playing at some point during the wedding and, you know, I probably, I used to play the violin when I was younger and I know I play violin, played violin because I liked the songs that my mum used to play that had fiddles in.

So this is like, tra-, like, trad music as they would call it?

Yeah, yes, yeah, which she listens a lot of and a lot of Paul Brady, anyone from that, yeah, an awful [01:20:00] lot of Paul Brady I grew up listening to, and, and songs along that, some of them were protest songs, so some of them, you know, the ones the Pogues covered and stuff and I, I–

‘Streets of’, ‘Streets of Sorrow’ and that kind of thing.

Yeah, ‘The Recruiting Sergeant’ as well was a particular favourite of mine when I was younger and I, I remember being proud of the fact that I knew the history behind it.

Sure.

I understood the song because I knew why, you know, they were, they were saying certain things in it, so that’s definitely informed my view of, of the world, and I think it’s probably informed my view of England.

That’s interesting, so as in, to give you a slightly more critical or a more negative view?

Not negative per se, but not a, an, an Anglocentric view, possibly, so even if we leave out the question of learning about Irish history, English history’s very whitewashed in school. You learn about, you know, the Romans, the Tudors, ignore the whole part of colonialism, World War Two, that’s it [laughs].

[laughs] That’s exactly, exactly my curriculum at school, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you completely ignore the whole parts of colonialism, but I was aware of the colonialism.

Sure, because–

And I, yeah, because–

Northern Ireland is kind of part of that history, right?

Yeah, and so because of that it’s definitely, I, I don’t know, I, I definitely took English, English history with a pinch of salt, this whole, you know, we’re fantastic, look at us, we did this, you did it on the backs of a lot of people that you don’t mention, so yeah, it’s, I, I still find it weird, so I, I’m looking at my bookshelf right now, I’ve got books about medieval history, Irish history, my brother buys me a lot of Irish history books cos he likes reading them as well, so he’ll read them and give them to me. I have one book about England and I don’t like, I like learning about medieval history and so on and so forth, but in terms of the history of England itself I don’t enjoy learning about it because it tends to leave out a lot of stuff, so I think it’s definitely informed my view of British history and, you know, flag waving and everything that comes with that, it’s, it’s not, I never felt a connection to the Union Jack, at all.

Never a kind of, no, no kind of like, patriotism?

No, and I never felt a connection to the Union Jack cos the only times I ever saw the Union, cos it, you know, it wasn’t, you know, no one flew the Union Jack in the, in the eighties, was going through parts of Northern Ireland where it was painted on the–

Yeah, on the kerbstones and stuff.

On the, yes, and I remember my mum being very wary in places like that, and so to me the Union Jack is, is, it’s not a negative thing, I get the point of flags, but it’s, it’s not something I’ve ever felt a connection to, in fact, I probably associate it with Britpop more than I do with the actual, yeah [laughs].

Well, I was going to say the Union Jack is interesting cos you were saying about Irishness getting kind of rehabilitated, the Union Jack got kind of rehabilitated in England as well, right, it was, like, it used to be associated with the National Front, with racism and for me, with like, Protestant Northern Ireland, but then during the kind of Britpop era and during the World Cups and stuff like, football, football World Cups, you see it everywhere now.

My mum still isn’t a huge fan of it, we have a, when we went away we used to go on Woodcraft camps. My friend Jenny who is a year older than me, she was hugely into her Britpop and she managed to get a pop-up Union Jack tent, and this was in the, you know, early noughties when it was the thing, everyone, you know, Blur were everywhere, Oasis were everywhere, and I remember her putting it up and my mum just staring at it, staring and staring at it like, this is a, this is an eleven-year-old girl, she’s got, she’s really proud of her tent, but I’m not okay with this being in the middle [laughs], but, you know, we still speak to Jenny, my mum was at her wedding last year, so, you know, she, we still, Jenny still makes a joke about the fact that she put up a massive Union Jack tent in front of a Northern Irish woman [laughs], which is quite fun, but yeah, but it, yeah, I associate it more with that than I do with, with, yeah, what, what it was associated with it at the time where I was going round Northern Ireland and it was painted on, on various street furniture.

Yeah, that actually, actually something I haven’t asked about, before we finish, it’s just occurred to me, what about the church, were you, was the church, were you, is there a kind of Catholic thing?

No, no, so my dad is, is, he’s not anti-religion, but he’s not religious in the slightest, he’s, he’s, he’s not even an atheist, he’s agnostic.

It’s the, it’s the kind of working-class, socialist thing again, right?

Yeah, exactly, God is dead sort of thing, he grew up listening to John Lennon so, you know, that sort of idea, so he, he didn’t want me baptised as a child, he, you know, if I decided to take that route he wouldn’t have minded. My mum, although, you know, you’re never truly an ex-Catholic, you’re just a bad Catholic [indecipherable].

[laughs] Sure, yeah.

She went to a, you know, to Thornhill school, taught by nuns, you know, she went through the quintessential Irish Catholic upbringing, big family, everything that came with it, plus the connotations of her surname and being a Catholic in Northern Ireland, so it’s a sort of a mixed bag. There’s the traditional Catholic Irish upbringing, but a Catholic Irish upbringing in Derry in the sixties and seventies, which adds its own, you know, sheen to it. She still, you know, she still loves churches, she still carries Catholic guilt left, right and centre, but she is not religious, some members of my family still are, my, her sister is still, her sister-in-law’s still very, very Catholic, but it’s not something that’s ever featured in me growing up, though I have been to many Catholic funerals, Catholic weddings, Catholic baptisms, and everything that comes with it, but it, it’s not, it’s, I’m, I’m a complete non-believer.

Did you get married in a church or married in a registry?

No, in a registry, well, in a, not even a registry, assembly rooms. I know there will have been some murmurings from some members of the family that I didn’t, but it’s also not that, nothing I’ve been int-, I’ve been interested in, funnily enough I became, I became a godparent to my husband’s brother’s son last year, it, it was a Catholic service and they didn’t bother to check whether or not I’d been baptised or christened or, it’s a fairly forward-looking Catholic church I have to say because they’re not married.

Oh really, really, wow, okay.

Yeah, it’s a very, very English Catholic, quite, not quite C of E, but a lot more relaxed, but they never bothered to check if I’d been christened or baptised, and I wasn’t, and they just ticked the box and said that I was.

So you’re probably not strictly supposed to be a godparent, but–

No, but they just were like, they just assumed that I was because the north east still is, not particularly religious, but they, people still get christened and baptised up here as a standard, so they just assumed that I was and I sat there thinking I can’t, I can’t be, but never mind, but I did have to do the whole, you know, I, I cast the devil out in the name of the saints and everything that came with it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And James had never been to a Catholic, or to a Catholic baptism before, and I sat there before we sat down and went you know this is going to go on for about an hour and a half, this isn’t like a C of E christening that’s over in ten minutes, where you just sing a song and you’re out, I was like, sit yourself down cos this is going to be [laughs]–

It’s quite, it’s quite an intense, it’s quite an intense thing and all, the kind of casting the Devil out stuff, I, I was at my first Catholic baptism with some Italian Catholic kind of in-laws five or six years ago and I was startled by the, by the seriousness of it I suppose.

Yeah, and it was, though what was very weird was sitting in an English Catholic service because I’d always, to me, Catholic, Catholic services have an Irish accent, cos it’s always been the Irish side of the family and there’s been a wedding or a funeral or something, and to, to hear, to hear the priests in Eng-, in a north-eastern accent as well, I thought this is, this is at odds with what I’m used to, but yeah, I hadn’t been to a, a Catholic baptism in ages and to finally be part of one was, I don’t know, it’s comforting cos I knew what I was, what was going on, I knew what was happening, whereas I used to go to, to English services, C of E services and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and they say the Lord’s Prayer, I still know the Lord’s Prayer from having to go to many ones, but they add the bit on the end.

There’s the, there’s the extra line at the end, isn’t there, yeah.

Yeah, and that still catches me out because I’d only ever really been to Catholic services over my lifetime, for various members of the family, cos my dad’s side of the family are completely non-religious, there’s no, there’s no religion, no, no, even tipping the hat to the church type of thing, so that was weird, but it was, it was, yeah, it was, strap in, we’re going to be here for an hour and a half [laughs], this is not going to be in and out.

[laughs] Yeah, I always feel sorry for the baby really.

Yeah.

Well, alright, that was really, really interesting. I don’t think I’ve got any more like, direct questions, to be honest. I, I guess I’ve been asking everyone like, is there anything we haven’t talked about that you thought that we might talk about, or anything that you, that you wanted to bring up?

No, not particularly, it’s, yeah, the main thing is, well, it’s about identity isn’t it, and it’s, it’s an odd one because, yeah, it’s, it’s split across, split across the Irish Sea basically, is what it feels to me at times, and I can use it at various times. I do remember my mum teaching me, she did well in her job because she had an accent, people remembered who she wa-, she was, and when I moved–

Right, it gives you a kind of a–

Yeah, you’re, you’re, naturally people remember you, and when I moved up here I definitely used that and put a very strong London accent on when I was trying to, in meetings and stuff, so then I’d be remembered. Now the irony is I work with a bunch of Londoners and people from Ireland, so I haven’t got a hope in hell [laughs], cos you all have accents and I don’t, just push a slight north-eastern twang to stuff and see if that, if people remember me that way.

That, that, that might work.

So there were, it wasn’t, you know, being from Northern Ireland [01:30:00] for her, there were some bad bits, but it, you know, there was some bits that like, you know, if you have an accent people will always remember you, sort of thing, so they, you know, she definitely taught me about being somewhere, being somewhere when you’re from somewhere else and I think that’s why I was okay up here, my accent stuck out like a sore thumb, but I taught, I’d been taught that was a good thing.

You can, you can–

I don’t know whether that was, yeah.

You can kind of enjoy that almost as a–

Well, I also think that probably she was shielding me from some of the bad stuff when I was younger, cos people would tell me as a child that she had a different accent, I had no idea, but she’d be like, it’s fine, different accents are fun, trying to take me away from the fact that at that point in the early nineties people were pointing out that my mum was Irish for very different reasons than they would now.

It was, it was still, it still had a kind of a negative connotation.

Yeah, yeah, they were still, you know, the, the lowly Irish peasant type view that I was definitely aware of when I was old enough to understand it, but it, like I said it, it disappeared.

I think, I think the fact that you’re interested in history coming out of all of this is, is really interesting as well. It seems like it kind of, it, it’s a way of making sense of, of a sort of slightly complicated identity.

Probably, yeah, and it’s definitely, I’d say it definitely help, I do-, it definitely helps me understand that period of time because I want to learn about it, and I want to read about it and I want to know, also I want to know where half of my DNA comes from.

Sure.

Cos, you know, given that my grandmother was from Donegal, so not Northern Irish, and my grandfather was Irish until he was Northern Irish, till, till the, the counties were created, you know, he woke up one day and he was no longer–

Sudden-, suddenly it’s changed, yeah.

Suddenly he’s Northern Irish where Northern Ireland, you know, never existed before, before he was an Irishman as part of the British Empire and then suddenly he’s Northern Irish and he’s technically British, so yeah, half my DNA comes from that part of the world, a very, very small part of the world, there’s a churchyard in, just outside Moville where I’m related to about fifty per cent of the people in there because my mum’s side, my grandmother, they never left Moville until she married my grandfather and came to Derry, so, you know, I’m probably, probably slightly too closely related to some of the people in the graveyard, but, you know, it was the, it was Donegal in the 1800s, no one, no one moved, no one went there, no one came out of there.

Very kind of isolated, little rural communities in the west of Ireland, yeah.

So it’s, the, the little museum, the fishing museum in Moville, the boat outside the front of it is the boat my mum learned to row in.

That’s ama-, that’s [laughs]–

My grandfather taught her, yeah, so I like, but I think that makes it easy because it’s such a remote little community you can learn a lot about it just by being there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whereas my dad’s, all the Londoners, I know roughly bits about them and where they lived, but, you know, London’s a big city to try and find anything else, you know, about the individual, about, but, you know, it’s, maybe I just like it cos it’s easier to learn about and I can, I don’t have to think about it as much.

It’s easier to kind of trace like, roots and connections somewhere as small as Moville, yeah.

Yeah, and to, to, you know, dotted around the hills around there are all some part of a family or some relation, whether it be by marriage or birth to, to my grandmother’s side.

It’s a beautiful, it’s beautiful part of the world as well.

Yeah, it’s not a difficult place to have to traipse round, see how everyone’s doing [laughs], I’m not disappointed that she’s from there, there is that, that helps, if she’d been from, you know, some other part like, like, let’s say Leicester, I wouldn’t, maybe not’ve had such beautiful childhood memories of going back to there or–

No, sure, that make sense. Okay, well, I, I think that’s covered everything for me, unless you’ve got anything else.

No, not at all.

Okay, well, thank you so much [laughs].

You’re welcome, thank you.

No, I really appreciate it, it was really interesting, and you’ve sent me the consent form haven’t you, so–?

Yes, yeah, I sent it as a Google doc, so if it’s, if it’s being a bit funny just let me know and I’ll send it through as a Word.

Aye, I think that should be grand. I’m going to send you a little information sheet as well, which’ll just have some kind of practical details that we might not have discussed like date of birth and stuff like that.

Ah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s fine.

But there’s no, no hurry with that, but yeah, thanks again, I really appreciate it, hopefully the recording has worked, I think it has [laughs].

If it hasn’t please just let me know, I’m happy to sit and chat again.

Okay, we can, we can do another one if we have to, but yeah, thanks very much Eleanor–

No problem.

And enjoy the rest of your, your day.

Yeah, you too, and, and good luck with it, I look forward to reading it all.

Oh yeah, I should say actually, we’ll, I’ll, we’ll be in touch and if we’re ever sort of writing any, we’re going to, hopefully going to write a book at some point.

It’s something I’d definitely read as you’ve probably gleaned anyway [laughs], something I probably would have read regardless, so I look forward to it and good luck with it.

Alright, well, we’ll definitely be in touch, alright, thank you, take care.

Okay, thanks a lot, bye, bye.

Bye, bye.