There's an Egg in My Soup (19 page)

The thrill of being married was followed by a hard landing within a week, upon coming back from a trip to southern Poland with some of the Irish guests. We had really organised nothing, not even knowing where we would live – at my school flat or in Asha's flat, which would mean having no privacy at all. We tried a bit of both, and neither worked. Asha didn't want to live in a school boarding block and I went stir crazy living in a flat with Asha's mother and sister. After years of independence, I couldn't do it. People had even asked me how I was going to manage living with a wife
suddenly after all that time. Most people practise for about a year before taking the plunge. Faith, love, hope and charity was the answer I had for that one. But they weren't going to get us out of the hole we were then in.

We had loosely agreed to continue doing what we were doing, but with the festivities over, the guests returned home and the future staring us in the face, things looked different. There weren't any real job prospects in Poland for myself, apart from teaching. So I tried one other route that I thought might work.

Towards the end of that fifth year, myself and Barry dreamed up the notion of creating our own magazine for the ex-pats of Warsaw. It seemed rash, but actually, unlike owning our own bar, it was more feasible given the right amount of work, a book of contacts and good intuition. The first two of these were there; I think it was the third part that let us down in the end.

We had several guys around Warsaw who were working for the
Warsaw Voice
and were happy to contribute. We had people in a few businesses who were available for support and ready to throw ads at us. And finally, we met an Englishman one night who was willing to invest if he thought the project was interesting enough. So we got a rough plan together and went to meet him. It was only then that the depth of our ignorance became evident.

This man was what people term a venture, or ‘vulture', capitalist. A very helpful character nonetheless,
he met us one evening in one of Warsaw's top hotels and we explained as best we could what our masterplan was. He seemed reasonably impressed until he asked us how much money we were looking for to start up. This was something we'd been discussing for weeks. Do we go for the big one and ask for a million, or do we look at a small figure that will get us off the ground? We decided on the latter and when we mentioned a sum of five or ten grand, he slammed his folder shut and sat back, shaking his head. We began whimpering, changing our figure to three grand, two grand, but his head continued to shake.

‘You don't understand, guys, if you'd asked me for half a million, a million, I'd have obliged. You're sitting here giving me names of a few hacks in the
Warsaw Voice,
you should be telling me you want to buy the
Warsaw Voice.
'

Sometimes reality has a harsh bite and we felt the teeth marks for weeks after that. The man was right. Why invest ten grand to get eleven grand back, when you can invest a million and get back two? And why didn't that occur to us? Where had we been the last five years? That demon had come to haunt us. We had been stagnating in small rural towns for so long, we'd forgotten that the rest of the world was rapidly passing us by. That included Warsaw. There were many people like this Englishman, over to invest in the new market.

Poles were leaving their villages and small towns in
droves, coming up to the capital to take advantage of the influx of foreign companies into the city. Those companies wouldn't have been there if it were never going to prove financially viable. The problem with involving yourself in a country that is ‘in transition', is that you yourself are at great risk of standing still.

So we decided, Asha and I, literally within the week, to leave. We went into the tourist office on a Friday and bought a one-way ticket out for the following week. It was a quick decision and an easy one to make. Whatever reason I had for coming here five years ago, there was no reason for my being here any longer. Even the school director, a great man who had done so much for me over the years, knew it. Unlike every other year, he didn't even try to persuade me to stay any longer. He thanked me, gave me a presentation at a teachers' meeting and it was all over. It was very abrupt, but it was probably best that way.

Despite this, I admit to being pretty despondent at the prospect of leaving for good. The first year, although it was the toughest and loneliest year of my life, was also the most enjoyable and emotional year I will probably ever have. The teachers in the school were beautiful, warm people, as were ninety percent of the kids. At the end of each school year, when a group of classes finished their Matura and left, my heart would sink knowing that I'd never see them again.

There were many students that I grew close to, who I think about in my quieter moments, and who I hope have found good lives for themselves. If it wasn't for them – their resilience, their openness and the sheer warmth they had for me – I'm sure I would very quickly have just left. The group I came over with were also incredible, and even if we didn't get to meet up as much as we should have, some have become lifelong friends.

It wasn't conquering the Himalayas. It wasn't saving lives in Bosnia. It was probably selfishness rather than altruism that drove me there in the first place. But it was good. There was also something of a paradox in it: The longer I stayed, the further away from that first, incredible year I grew. It was the benchmark by which I measured everything. It is a hard thing to look back at a peak, regardless of what stage you are at in your life, knowing that it, or anything like it, is never to be repeated. It is also a little strange calling what must sound like abject misery a peak.

I often wondered if our project achieved anything. The simple answer is, I don't know. It is one thing to feel you've achieved something on a personal level – matured, learned more about yourself, humanity and living – but it is a different thing to attempt to gauge your broader success. I know there were those who were grateful, but gratitude is no real measure of accomplishment. I was sure, however, that the country
was a long way from resolving its problems and was about to face new and inescapable ones.

Shortly before I was due to leave, I had a visit from one of my old students. She was a fabulous girl and had achieved a ‘6' grade, almost unheard of, in her English Matura. She called to my flat and asked me how she could get to London to work for the summer. I told her that, as it was already the end of June, there wasn't much chance. She seemed almost desperate, saying that I was her only hope – which was a bit desperate – and that she badly needed to work abroad over the summer to make money for the following year in college. I went over the various official courses of action and finally outlined the other route – hopping on a plane or bus and hoping for the best.

But I had already seen countless men, women and students turned back from the airport, or, once when I got a bus to London, at the ports. There was one man I remember in particular, who, having travelled almost forty hours on the bus to visit his daughter in England, was put on a bus straight back to Poland, heartbroken. It was tough for Poles. This girl knew that was a risk that would incur serious loss if she failed. I don't know what she decided to do in the end, and I was sorry I couldn't help her. I felt I owed them all something. At the same time, I knew that freedom to move across Europe was not too far away, and that there was a chance that she, and others I had taught over the
years, would one day stroll around Dublin, free to look for a job and make some decent money.

Packing after such a length of time is a strange thing. As you drag the items together one by one, there's a sense of finality about it. It's not just a wash bag and a few books. There are things that suggest permanency and have a strong scent of the place that for so long was called home, things that are inevitably left until last. And there's a lump in your throat as you go through them all – birthday cards, Christmas cards, withered flowers, empty bottles, drawings from the kids in school, old exercise books, obsolete money with strings of zeros and pictures of communists.

There are bits of furniture that have accumulated over the years. There's the beast of a Polish television that took up a whole corner. There's the brown, rectangular radio from the 1950s that the director gave me as company in the first week. There's a rug whose colour has faded from years of sun, snow, muck and sand on the soles of boots. There are tins of food that were never eaten. Newspapers under the spare bed. Bottles under the sink. Clothes that were never worn.

These are the things you can't take with you. So they go into large black bags and then into the skip. Then there's the photo-frame. Pictures of students, teachers, the band, great Polish friends who I haven't seen for so long and are probably married and have kids. Every photo has a story, a moment. Each face frozen in a
place in time that is as clear now as when it first happened. I won't get to say goodbye to any of them.

The photos just made that lump more prominent and I went to bed feeling just like a stranger should feel leaving a strange land, only I was no longer really a stranger. Lying there, I began to go over the images I'd conjured up for myself before arriving, comparing them to what I'd seen so far. You don't expect a thousand volts of culture shock coming to a place like this. It's not the centre of Africa or the Middle East. It's still Europe, but it's a part of Europe that most of us have only peeped at while it was hidden behind the iron curtain.

The timber houses, smoke gasping out of their chimneys day and night, sitting under the shadow of grey blocks that clawed the landscape like broken umbrellas. Old men with shattered teeth, young girls with bright blonde hair, packed under scarves decorated with the flowers of spring. Fields that were golden in autumn and steel blue in winter. Cold vodka, warm beds and the sound of men singing in taverns, keeping a beat with the thud of beer tankards on long wooden tables. Then I just drifted off to sleep. Only this time not alone.

May 2005. Sunday, 2pm. Outside St Michan's Church in Smithfield, Dublin, crowds of Poles begin to gather.

There are cars and vans with Polish registrations. There are new arrivals eating Polish food from backpacks. There is even a man selling Polish newspapers:
Gazeta Wyborcza,
the paper of the electorate, with over five million readers, which began as a humble eight-page weekly in May 1989, published by some of those who had previously published an underground paper; and
Tygodnik Mazowsze
(meaning The Weekly Mazowiecki, after the region in Poland).

‘How much for the paper?'

‘Two euro,' he says.

‘But it says two zloty on the cover.'

‘A zloty for a euro,' he smiles.

Actually it's not. There are four zloty to a euro. But he's right to be charging more. The papers had to be taken all the way overland from Warsaw by bus, a bus operated from a Polish office in Store Street in Dublin, which arrives twice weekly, full of Poles, to be met by more Poles. Some are picking up parcels sent by their families back home, others who were unsuccessful at
finding a job are climbing back on board. For the time being, that bus and the newspapers it brings are the only source of income for this man, who has been here three weeks, with little money and no English.

Work is all he talks about, until his colleague tells him that mass is about to start. Within minutes, the whole crowd outside is jammed inside and you wouldn't fit a mass leaflet between the bodies.

Fr Andrew Pyka, who says mass at St Michan's, arrived here in 2003 as Parish Priest of Sallynoggin, having worked in Australia for twenty years and England for five. Before Poland acceded to the EU, a Polish mass was an occasional feature in the calendar of the Polish-Irish Society in Fitzwilliam Square, celebrated if there happened to be a Polish priest here for study leave or even just for a visit. May 2004 changed all that. By November of that year, 50,000 immigrants from the ten new EU states arrived in Ireland, almost 25,000 of them Poles. And these were only figures collated at the time from the PPSN (Personal Public Service Numbers) data, which only counts registered workers.

‘Fitzwilliam was just inadequate,' says Fr Andrew. ‘There were more services needed. People were standing all over the place and even to have a cup of tea it was impossible. I was hearing confessions in the toilets because there was no room.'

Confession? There was really such a demand for confession?

‘Poles won't go to communion without going to confession. And there are marriage preparation courses to do too. Okay, we've got the equivalent here, but some of them couldn't cope with the language barrier. Generally, ninety-five percent are Polish people marrying Polish people. And there is going to be more and more. In January I finished courses for some fifty couples. And there will be another one in April.

‘But that's only one part of it. There are constant requests from people from places like Belfast. Some come to Sallynoggin on the bus just for confessions. I'm going to New Ross and the Wexford area to hear mass. On Easter Monday I'm going to Limerick, because there is no one there. There is no one in Cork. I'm getting requests from there. Plus I have my own parish here, with 2,500 families. I can't let them down.'

In 2005, Fr Andrew was still the sole representative of the Polish Catholic Church in Ireland. He managed to get the use of St Michan's after discussions with Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. But very quickly, even this church became inadequate. Apart from the masses, he badly needed to improve on the social area upstairs where the congregation were invited to meet after mass. It was just too small for socialising.

‘So if they want to go and socialise they go to the pub,' he says. ‘And they drink like hell and they get drunk. And then they fight.'

This worries him. He told the Archbishop that he was
sitting on a ‘pastoral bomb' that might explode. There are other ethnic groups in the city – Lithuanians, Russians, Ukranians – who ‘were not such good pals when we were in Poland and they were behind the border because they were part of Russia'. If frustration, financial difficulties and all the problems that go with emigration are not channeled through him, the only familiar voice in a foreign country, then how might thousands vent their dissatisfaction?

There are plenty of Polish people in Ireland who have professional careers. There are plenty of students who will come over, assimilate and vanish into the crowds. Fr Pyka's problem is that most Polish people here are ‘working within the 1000-word group' and won't cope with integration that easily.

‘Remember the reason they are coming here is to send some bacon home. It is so sad when some of them get lost completely. And that worries me. In Poland – I don't want to say simple people – but ordinary people in towns and villages, everybody goes to the church. You remove them from that environment and they can't find their feet. They get lost.

‘Faith was what helped us to survive for so long. And if you take the faith from the Polish people they haven't got much. Faith is very closely linked with our nationality. You wouldn't expect to meet a Polish person who is not a Catholic. Because of our faith we were able to stay together and fight back.'

A week later I return to the same church at the same time. A man gives me a slip of paper with a number on it and asks if I need a lift to Poland. He works as a refrigeration technician for an Irish company who have given him a company car. He doesn't need his own car, so he'll drive it back home to his family. But why travel in an empty car? He can fill the seats with people and make some money.

Another man, in his early fifties, a tiler from Bydgoszcz. He has no English whatsover and is struggling to find a job. He borrowed from a bank to get here and his family is waiting at home for money. He asks about me, my wife and whether I have children. When I tell him I've no children because they're too expensive and I needed a house first, he's shocked. Rent a house, he says. Family is more important than houses. Maybe, but he doesn't know modern Ireland.

The man with the newspapers is there again. Only they are the same newspapers that he was selling last week. He shrugs and blames the bus, which had no room for newspapers this week. It was too full of people. Just like the mass.

Two years later, the Polish community in Ireland has mushroomed. Everybody talks about them. There are Polish programmes on an Irish television channel, articles appearing in papers about professional Poles, presumably as opposed to the tradesmen, the Polish
plumbers. There are Polish newspapers, like the
Polski Herald,
printed by an Irish newspaper. And there are papers printed by Poles for Poles. There are Polish shops in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Newry and elsewhere, shops where many of the staff don't even speak English.

There are road safety campaigns and government information leaflets translated into Polish and any bank with an ounce of sense employs as many Polish people as they can get in their doors.

There are up to six Polish teams playing football in Dublin alone, in the Brian Kerr anti-racism league, and there are regular gigs by visiting Polish bands who have also seen the market in Ireland's new immigrants.

The low-cost airlines are adding routes to various parts of Poland so fast that Dublin airport can't keep up. And the buses are arriving several times a week now, offloading a couple of hundred more Poles. With their Polish papers and their bags of cabbage and sausage, they disappear down the quays somewhere in the dark.

Fr Pyka's campaign to get a new church and more helpers even paid off. Fr Jaroslaw Maszkiewicz is the new chaplain in Ireland, and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin presented the Poles with their own new church, St Audeon's on High Street, with an inaugural mass attended by the Polish primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, in September 2006. But you can count on Poles to get things done, that's for certain. At the mass, Cardinal Glemp said that, ‘I believe Ireland will become the
place of return to faith for many of you and will deepen the bond with your Homeland.' A ‘return' to faith sounds like an unusual comment. Judging by the amount of Polish masses, from Abbeyfeale to Youghal, now listed on the Polish chaplaincy website, there is no shortage of Poles attending church here. It is the Irish who have lost their faith.

One of the other leading Polish newspapers,
Rzeczpospolita,
conducted a poll asking people whether they were going to go abroad for work in 2007. ‘Yes,' was the answer given by twelve percent of those questioned. That's about 3.2 million citizens and only three countries are likely to be chosen as a destination – Germany, the UK and Ireland. According to the paper, in 2006 about 360,000 Poles had already gone abroad for work.

Even the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, who bragged about unemployment coming down from almost twenty percent – forgetting that 360,000 of the labour force had left – couldn't resist the lure of the Emerald Isle. Having taunted those who went abroad and left their motherland to seek work, in February 2007 he paid a state visit to Ireland to praise them. He also managed to put his community at risk of serious reprimand, if not worse, by saying that logically – and, of course, biologically – the human race would disappear eventually if homosexuality were to become the dominant sexual persuasion. He was ambushed into
saying that by someone who was aware that his government didn't exactly keep a check on the ‘gay bashers' who attack Gay Pride marches. And his government have done a lot more to bring down the wrath of the EU upon them. But, as any Pole will tell you, there are a lot worse than the Kaczynski twins when it comes to right-wing politics in Poland.

There are problems now in the construction industry in Poland. People who buy a new apartment buy it ‘in the raw' – an empty shell. Skirting, sinks, partition walls, bathrooms, the whole shebang has to be sourced. They need to find the plumbers, the carpenters and the plasterers to complete their new homes. But there are none to be found. If you do find one, be prepared to wait. And to pay for it.

Polish service industries have had to look to countries like the Ukraine to fill jobs in the hotels and bars. And who is going to pick the fruit in summer that is so vital to Poland's economy? The Moldovans maybe?

But we could be looking at our own problems soon. Dell in Limerick is the most efficient Dell plant in the world. It is also the lifeblood of Limerick, with 3,000 employed. In fact, six in every 100 workers in the Limerick, Clare and west Tipperary region work for Dell. And where are Dell planning to go to? Poland. Procter and Gamble have been employing 280 people since 1985 in Nenagh, but in a cost-cutting measure they're packing up shop. Where are they going? Poland.

Is this the start of a trend? One wonders, did the Irish government not have a plan when they opened their borders? Did they not see that before its entry into the EU in 2004, Poland cut its corporate tax rate from twenty-seven percent to nineteen percent? The corporate tax rate in Ireland is still a low 12.5% for trading income. But factories that move to Poland can find workers who will be happy to toil for €300 a month. Throw in cheaper property prices and better infrastructure in the large pool of cities available, and one wonders how long we will be hanging onto our new Polish friends.

Another question. How many Poles do we include among our group of friends, even giving the term ‘friend' a bit of latitude when it comes to definition? Of course, you will find the few Poles from the office going for pints after work on Friday night. But did many Irish people invite Poles into their homes over Christmas or Easter, the way we were invited that first year when many of us were lost, lonely and half-starved in poor towns in eastern Poland? You will find these issues discussed on a website for the Polish community here. The Irish are great to go out and get drunk with, but I still haven't been asked around to their houses, said one blogger.

Of course, nobody really wants that many new friends. New friends can be a pain in the arse.

‘That's the second time we were out for dinner with
the Polish neighbours. Do you think we have to ask them over to the barbie next Sunday?'

‘Christ, no. I mean, we'll have your friends from work and a few of the guys are coming over – it will be a bit awkward. We'll give them a shout again.'

The most interesting aspect of working on the Polish paper at the
Herald
was the reaction to it from Irish people. Calls constantly came in from potential advertisers, who would tell you how many Poles there are in Ireland and how huge a market it has become. You had callers who owned this or that bar or restaurant or club, who were sure the Poles would love to come along. For most of them, the Poles were ‘a market'.

Not everyone thought that way though, not by any means. The Augustinian Friars in Smithfield in Dublin fed queues of unfortunate Poles daily. There were countless other charities that would phone out of genuine concern. You would get Irish people representing sporting clubs, societies and other bodies who, in another genuine gesture, wanted to place notices inviting Poles to join their respective groups in a social capacity. Then you had the old faithfuls.

‘I'm ringing a second time to complain about that Polish Herald blocking up my dustbin,' says the woman on the phone, without so much as an introduction. ‘Is that the Polish Herald?'

‘It is,' I reply. ‘What's the problem exactly?'

‘That Polish paper, it's a disgrace so it is. I don't want it in the paper that I've been buying for years. Why can't they do their own paper? It's a disgrace, having to look at that every week.'

‘Well, it's a supplement,' I say. ‘You can just pull it out.'

‘And why should I have to pay bin charges to get that rubbish taken away? It's a disgrace so it is. Why don't you have an Irish paper?'