24 April 2000

I've been in County Mayo, in Ireland. A friend of mine has built a house there, on land her family has owned for generations. It's just along the bay (Crew Bay) from the famine ship depicted here. I took the photo. This is the Irish national famine memorial. Beyond it is Croag Patrick, where pilgrims have walked, sometimes on their knees, in remembrance of when Saint Patrick himself stayed here forty days and nights, battling with pagan demons.

Lug, a pagan god, was apparently worhsipped here too. One of the pagan demons. His name survives in Lughnasa, the Irish for August, as in Brian Friel's play, 'Dancing for Lughnasa'.

My father's family comes from Mayo. The family myth is that two brothers came to Liverpool and were cheated of their tickets to America. One worked to earn the ticket all over again and emigrated to the USA; the other drank himself to death on the compensation from the Brits for the burning-down of their father's schoolhouse by the Black and Tans.

Whatever: here I am. (Here is the detail of the famine ship: that the rigging is made of corpses) Perversely English. In my childhood when Mum and Dad took me round Harewood House and its grounds - the home of the Earl and Countess of Harewood - I vividly remember Dad saying, 'This was all made with the suffering of the Irish, you know.'

I don't know if it was true. But that's what I grew up believing. Even though I was English, of English parents, I was really Irish. Like Jews are 'really' Jews, like the black English are 'really' West Indian or Nigerian or wherever their great-great-great-something came from. I've never grown out of this feeling. I'm not really English. Not like people from Hertfordshire or the Cotswolds. I'm the alien my Dad told me I was: Irish, in an English body. It still feels strange.