Now I realise why everyone in Ireland must know Steve!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

It’s a natural question. If you’ve ever left the parish, you’ll have been asked it too. “Where’re ya from?” To me, however, this innocent icebreaker has become an enquiry I dread.

As a Londoner who has lived in the West of Ireland for almost 25 years, my impatient heart demands I say that my home is 15 miles from Galway City, but I know that’s not what these people want to hear.

That’d just be yet another blow-in acting the bollox.

These lads are not really interested in the precise location I slid into the world. They’re just pulling at the reins and slavering to tell the tales, to share their stories of those days they lived ‘Over There’.

All they need is for me to ‘fess up that I come from London and they’re off, galloping into their rare auld experiences in England.

Oh yes, they were working over there in the ’50s/’60s/’70s/’80s/’90s. By God it was some time. I tell you now. There’s never been the like of it since.

Then they’ll ask if I know a pub called the Bunch of Grapes and do I know Steve?

When I first moved to Ireland I just couldn’t understand why seemingly intelligent and witty Irish people would leap on the fact that I came from London to ask me if I knew Steve.

A couple of decades later I now understand the significance of this question. It encapsulates the reason I love living here.

The town of my birth has a population just under twice that of the entire Republic of Ireland. The only way you survive living in a city that size is by minding your own business and having a close set of people to whom you cling.

I’m a Londoner and no, I don’t know Steve. I’ve never heard of him.

I wasn’t there.

It wasn’t me.

However, in Ireland the chances are that you do know Steve. Ireland never underwent the mass migration to the cities that the Industrial Revolution demanded in England. This country was not forged in steel foundries and coal mines. It isn’t that long ago you’d still hear the beef prices at the end of RTÉ radio evening news.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.