Here’s Irish Heritage Group Chair Michael Walsh’s write-up of the May event:
Monuments to Unsung Generations
An extra dramatic act was provided by the Gods (in case we have any ancient Greeks amongst our readers) at the opening of the Birmingham Irish Heritage Group Event on Wednesday 6th of May 2009. IT equipment necessary to show the film was affected by gremlins’ or fairies and just when the two committee members involved were after a long struggle about admit defeat a man charged to the rescue from a distant horizon.
Well! Actually it was a man named Jackie who came forward from the rear of the crowd and modestly offered his help, and got the film started. Believe it or not, it was his first visit to a Heritage Group Event always held at 7pm on First Wednesday of each month, talk about divine intervention. A famous quotation is appropriate “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man”.
If you have heard a rumour that the committee staged all this for dramatic affect, and that the man who came to the rescue was an actor who been had hidden away, it is untrue. In fact he is a student of architecture. However it worked just as well, providing a drama in which good triumphed over evil, i.e. the IT bad spirits defeated by divine intervention.
Then came the very moving film “An Bothar Fada” (The Long Road), an historic record of two generations from Ireland who migrated to Britain from the forties on. An appropriate name for the story of the men who toiled on many long roads, and the women who worked the buses on endless city streets, and others who worked long nightshifts nursing the sick in the NHS.
They toiled and struggled to make a home, as strangers in a strange land. John Kane a long standing supporter of the Heritage Group, gave a moving contribution from the floor of how he had toiled under such harsh conditions. Mary Pearson another well known supporter of the Heritage Group, voiced the need for a film to celebrate the contribution of the Irish in building up British Trade Unions, represented well above their numbers at all levels of leadership.
Peter Mulligan coming all the way from Northampton to present the film, spoke with great determination on how the young Irish, put much into building up the economy of the host community, and because they were young and fit took very little out, a fact often forgotten. Motorways and other long roads of Britain, are monuments to the unsung generations of Irish who built them.
They are however monuments without inscriptions to recognise their work, the only inscription being to Government Ministers with unsoiled hands. At least they are remembered in this film, and other records of heritage brought to all by the Birmingham Irish Heritage Group. Now bringing you a little known almost secret aspect of Irish Heritage at 7pm on Wednesday 3rd of June 2009 at the Irish Club, High Street, Digbeth, Birmingham. All Welcome, no charge, refreshments.
Michael Walsh
