Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The truth about stories’: Personal Perspectives on Ulster Migration
- PART I Theory, History and Demography
- PART II Voices of Migration and Return
- 3 ‘They were always missed, they were always mentioned’: Migration, Generation and Family History
- 4 ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ Religion, Migration and Identity
- 5 ‘Doubly invisible’: Being Northern Irish in Britain
- 6 A very tolerant country’: Immigration to Canada
- 7 ‘I'm back where I belong’: Return Migration
- Postscript
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- List of Interviews
- Index
4 - ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ Religion, Migration and Identity
from PART II - Voices of Migration and Return
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Abbreviations
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The truth about stories’: Personal Perspectives on Ulster Migration
- PART I Theory, History and Demography
- PART II Voices of Migration and Return
- 3 ‘They were always missed, they were always mentioned’: Migration, Generation and Family History
- 4 ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ Religion, Migration and Identity
- 5 ‘Doubly invisible’: Being Northern Irish in Britain
- 6 A very tolerant country’: Immigration to Canada
- 7 ‘I'm back where I belong’: Return Migration
- Postscript
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- List of Interviews
- Index
Summary
Majorities and Minorities: ‘Reality very often is not what you would wish it to be’
David was born in Belfast in 1940 to a father from County Cork and a mother from Dublin. His father, an elderly man when David was born, had in a previous marriage already reared a family; working in the insurance business for many years in Dublin, Liverpool and Twickenham, London before settling in Belfast during the 1930s. He was also a Baptist lay preacher, a Freemason and held strong Unionist beliefs. David's mother was raised in the Church of Ireland in which he himself was confirmed. In his childhood home, David remembered the photograph of King George VI on the living room wall, first in Belfast and later when they moved to Cork when he was in primary school. There the family lived in the city centre in the South Mall area; and David attended a Protestant school which catered largely for the sons of the Cork Protestant business community. Here he describes the people of their circle:
My father was a Freemason and what I didn't really grasp as a child was that as a Freemason we tended to know all the local businessmen. But as a child you accept all of that as being normal. It isn't abnormal. It was only afterwards I realised, why did we know these people? And I suspect it was because of my father's connections as a Freemason. I didn't see anything sinister in it then, nor, for that matter, now. It was just the people we mixed with … I wouldn't want to bring class into it but I mean they were sort of respectable people, decent people … You got to know the owner of the local bakery and the local printing works and so on and so forth. Because certainly in the forties and fifties it was a time when, shall we say, small businesses were more prominent than they are now. Big business hadn't arrived (interview, London, VMR–077).
As David adjusted to life in the South of Ireland, he was teased about his northern accent but he didn't recall this causing him any real difficulty.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Leaving the NorthMigration and Memory, Northern Ireland 1921–2011, pp. 87 - 127Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013