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Migration the focus of Dermot Bolger’s latest

By admin | November 21, 2006

Dermot Bolger, the poet who was the keynote speaker at Éan’s 2005 conference, has a new play that touches on both emigration and immigration. “The Townlands of Brazil”, playing now in Ballymun’s Axis Arts Centre, tells the stories of two young women: one, a mother who emigrates to England in the 1960s, and the second, a Polish widow and mother who immigrates to Ireland forty years later.

Bolger told the Sunday Business Post:

“My extended family would be a typical Irish family [in that] I have loads of cousins with Wolverhampton accents and Liverpool accents and very few with Irish accents.

“When I was growing up, my own generation felt that we didn’t have to emigrate, but we soon realised that we were just a brief hiccup in the system, and once the 1980s started, there was a whole generation of young people who had to go abroad again. Of course, now that has turned around, and people are coming back, and immigrants are coming in.

“But when I talk to Polish people and Romanian people who live here, I often feel that I’m looking at my uncles and aunts, and all those generations of Irish people who had to leave their homes and start new lives.”

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