History Repeating: Eamonn McCann on Brexit and Ireland

The British government has begun booting bunches of delinquents back to where they came from even if they’d never been there in the first place.

Rory Moore and Red Organ Serpent Sound remind us in ‘Dennis Doherty’ that something similar used to be done to the Irish.
There are two dedicated detention centres at Heathrow airport where reprobates are caged until there’s a plane-load assembled and ready to go. There’ll be no true-born Brits aboard.

But if you were born elsewhere and have committed an offence for which you could be sent down for a year, you are in the frame for forcible ejection. Thus – in a case cited this month on Newsnight on BBC2 – a teenager convicted of possession of cocaine can be sent “back” to Jamaica, despite having lived with his family in the UK since he was six-months-old.
Meanwhile, deputy Prime Minister Michael Gove can cheerfully admit to having snorted cocaine on “numerous” occasions in his twenties and thirties and to have been “lucky” to stay out of jail. Of course, luck had nothing to do with it. It’s just he was the class of person automatically accorded kid-glove treatment.

A teenager groomed to deliver drugs to Gove can be jailed and sent into exile by the government of which Gove is a leading member.

Some on the deportation list will have committed serious crimes. But many have not. These are selected in dawn raids for consignment to the holding pens to await the next prison-airship.

The American writer and academic Bonnie Greer has likened the expulsion today of overwhelmingly black Britons for fairly minor offences to the deportation yesterday of another irksome demographic – the Irish. Dennis Doherty from Derry was among them.

I discovered Dennis one woozy recent night while lending an idle ear to Rory’s latest rumination on the way history bubbles up to bring us all back where we came from. “Dennis, can you hear me?” the track begins, calling out across the oceans and the aeons in plaintive vibrato.

Dennis was born in 1814 in what we now call the Bogside. There wasn’t much to do in Derry at the time, especially for any of the indigenous sort. He and two pals, William Moore and Jim O’Dea, joined the British army. At the time, four out of 10 British rank-and-file soldiers were Irish. Within a couple of months, each of the three had had their backs lashed to ribbons for some imagined misdemeanours.

Marshalled on Guernsey for onward shipping to India, they made a run for it. All were captured within days – Guernsey is tiny – convicted of desertion and sentenced to deportation, Dennis for a notional 14 years, Moore and O’Dea for seven. They spent four months crammed below the decks of a lurching, dysentery-ridden cargo ship before arriving in chains in South Australia. Split up immediately on landing, they never saw one another or Ireland again. Dennis was 19.

Sworn to himself to be free, he resisted all efforts to tame him. Made five serious attempts at escape over 40 years, was flogged each time to within an inch of his life. In 1871, aged 58, he made one last effort, spent five months in the outback, was near death from starvation and blind in one eye when captured again.

His case became somewhat celebrated after he was visited in prison by the English novelist Anthony Trollope, on a tour to write a travelogue. The interview was published in 1873 in Trollope’s (not very imaginatively-named) Australia and New Zealand. The script suggested that age rather than prison had broken him.

He explained to Trollope, “I have tried to escape, always to escape, as a bird does out of a cage.”

In Rory’s version, he finds himself “far from the quarry steps at the bottom of Spencer Road”. Time elides to conjure him “rock-and-rolling at the Northern Counties Hotel”.

(As it happens, coincidentally it might be, I am writing this in the Northern Counties Hotel, now a shambling four-storey building housing a solicitor’s office, a training centre and a maze of cubby-holes in the city centre.)

In a previous manifestation as Strength N.I.A. (Northern Ireland Aboriginals), Rory wrote a response to Melbourne band The Shifters’ ‘Creggan Shops’, behind which the Provos, and now their alphabet soup of epigones, order teenagers (“Meet me at the Creggan shops”, is not an invite to a date) to be mutilated for showing insufficient respect to the People’s Army du jour. Rory’s ‘1956 Olympics’ recalls the Melbourne games when half of our street was up in the middle of the night to hear Ronnie Delaney breast the tape.

Dennis might have been a model for ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, of which Strength’s raging, rapid-fire version is definitive. Left his Kerry home at the early age of 16 years, robbed the rich to help the poor, killed Judge McEvoy, a terror to Australia was the Wild Colonial Boy.

Dennis didn’t foresee being enclosed “in an unmarked grave far across the sea, in South Australia”. But that was his destined end, as for millions of others from the four corners of the earth, exiled, enslaved, striving to preserve within them a speck of the dignity of life. Dennis stands for all of them, forever in the dialogue that forever descends.

“Dennis can you hear me?”