Neither Emigrants Nor Exiles: The Doogans of Gortnasade

Neither Emigrants Nor Exiles:The Doogans of Gortnasade David Emmons (bio) a few years ago, Anthony Doogan of Moville, County Donegal, gave me copies of nearly fifty letters written between 1910 and 1925 by his three great uncles, Charles (in the letters, Charlie) James (Jimmie and Jim), and Michael (Mike and Mick) Doogan. The letters were written from various places the three had lived during the decade and a half that one or more of them were in North America, usually working in the coal mines near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island or the copper mines at Britannia Bay north of Vancouver in British Columbia or in Butte, Montana. The letters were to the Doogan family in the townland of Gortnasade (or Gortnasate), located on a narrow bay between Cruit Island and the mainland of western Donegal. Most were addressed to the fourth and youngest Doogan brother, Anthony, the grandfather of the Anthony who kept and cared for the letters and generously shared them with me. I read and transcribed all of them. Since I believe the Doogan brothers should be allowed to speak for themselves, I will quote from the letters frequently. And since the way they said things, including their spelling, grammar, and punctuation, is almost as important as what they said, I will edit them only where entirely necessary—and [sic] them never. When the three skipped putting a period at the end of their sentences—and they did so repeatedly—I will add the missing punctuation only if understanding their meaning requires it. "Translating" the Doogan letters is part of getting to know the three who wrote them; it's worth the effort.1 [End Page 65] The letters speak to more than just the lives of the Doogans; they offer a revealing glimpse into Irish Catholic immigrants to North America who left Ireland wanting and fully intending to return. This description applies to all three of the Doogans. Two of the three, Charlie and Jim, did return, and so, on at least one occasion, did Mike. Why Mike went back to British Columbia is not indicated in the letters, but it was certainly not because he had come to think of himself as an Irish Canadian. He was a misplaced Irishman when he got to British Columbia; he was the same when he returned and died there.2 The return migration of Irish immigrants is far lower than that of, say, Greeks and Italians, but that says far more about the Irish economy than about Irish immigrant intentions. And some of those immigrants' professions of undying love for Ireland were a way of dealing with the guilt they felt for having abandoned her. It would be unwise, however—not to say too cynical by half—to let that obscure what is equally obvious: a great number of those who said they wanted to repatriate meant precisely that. They meant it when they left Ireland, and nothing that happened to them during their misplaced years away from home changed their minds. I count the Doogans, both Charlie and Jim who returned permanently and Mike who did not, among them.3 They belong to a class of Irish immigrants that did not fit North Americans' self-congratulatory belief that the people of the Old World—at least those sentient and of sound mind—wanted nothing so much as to leave where they were and come to the New World. There was no place in this reckoning for those who reversed course. Historians of immigration are more discerning, but even for them "returned immigrant" was a contradiction in terms—to be the first was to cease to be the second. That, however, is too narrow a historical focus; what should matter is not the few Irish who returned home but the very great many who wanted to, and the only slightly fewer who left Ireland fully intending to. Let the Doogan letters be the anthem of those migrant people who left their homes solely that they might improve and return to them. At issue is what to call those repatriated immigrants. Students of human migration and resettlement have a figurative and culturally loaded vocabulary to [End Page 66] work...

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