Rory Fitzgerald
This St Patrick’s Day is our first as emigrants. Since arriving in England last summer, we’ve gone through all the usual things that face families moving overseas: finding schools and a place to live, filling out myriad forms, importing our cars, getting set up in work, registering to pay tax and to vote.
All the admin has been done and we’re now officially UK-residents. Yet Ireland still seems close: whenever I turn on Radio 4 it seems I’m as likely to hear an Irish accent as an English or Scottish one. The weather forecast mentions Ireland. The Isle of Wight, where we live, has the same rolling hills as West Cork, where I am from. People watch the same TV programmes, follow the same football teams and laugh at the same jokes in the queue at Tesco’s. England is really only a semi-foreign country these days.
Emigrants are often a pitied species, but we’ve just been getting on with things and enjoying the adventure of exploring a new place. Thankfully, the kids have enjoyed the move, with only the occasional yearnings for their old friends and the familiar places back home. They love the ‘Island’ – as the Isle of Wight is universally known here – with its chalk cliffs, beaches, more abundant sunshine, cosy villages and they have a great gang of new friends.
The downside has been that we’ve been living like nomads. In the past 12 months, we’ve lived in five houses across Ireland, France and England.
We’ve stayed in some for a few weeks, others for a few months but living out of boxes grows wearying. Our latest move is now underway and it is thankfully not overseas, but just two miles down the road on the Isle of Wight. The kids are moving even closer to their school and their new friends, so they are delighted. There are no more bus and car journeys to school but merely a short stroll through the village.
Accommodation
We are at last out of temporary accommodation and holiday lets and so we’ve been ordering beds, assembling flat pack furniture and scouring second hand shops for sundry bits and pieces. The help we’ve had from so many people on the Isle of Wight has been amazing. People have helped us settle in, find furniture, bikes, babysitters and friends.
As our new English neighbours have been so incredibly welcoming, we’ve ended up becoming involved in many aspects of island life, from the Coastguard, to choirs, to Beavers and ballet, as well as our day-to-day work.
We jet back to Ireland often enough for weekends and to see family. Flybe’s propeller planes take us straight from Southampton to Dublin or Cork in an hour. Ireland is close, yet it’s becoming increasingly distant too. Our new normal is yellow number plates, pounds, pence and the BBC.
We missed out on the craic of the Irish election, which seemed quite academic to us; what matters to our daily lives now happens in Westminster, not Leinster House. Yet that is true of Northern Ireland as well. There is an increasing cultural familiarity – even commonality – across these islands, even though there is such diversity too, across the many and varied regions of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.
Perhaps that simple friendliness will be the solvent that eventually dissolves the ancient tensions in the North. Those old quarrels and divisions seem increasingly anachronistic, when everyone else on these islands gets along so well these days. That, at least, is what I will be raising a glass to this St Patrick’s Day.