In the closing days of 2003, heated debates took place in the Irish parliament over the plight of elderly Irish men in Britain in the wake of a documentary shown on national television. Many of the interviewees in the programme had spent the best part of their working lives on the building sites of England, but due to major changes in the construction industry over the previous twenty years and the financially insecure nature of their employment, such men were now living out their final days in extremely impoverished conditions in the very towns and cities they helped rebuild after the Second World War. At a moment when the economic boom in Ireland had reached its peak, these disturbing images of destitute men exiled in the diaspora were an uncomfortable reminder of the potential consequences of a phenomenon which had, until the birth of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, appeared to be a permanent feature of Irish society, namely emigration. The images were all the more shocking because of their stark contrast with the popular impression of the navvy as a heroic representation of national strength and masculinity abroad. In this chapter, I analyse how literature has played a role in mediating and qualifying such heroic images in relation to the post-war Irish in London.

Historical studies into the experience of the Irish navvy in Britain have existed for some time, along with a growing body of criticism on autobiographical accounts, but very little research (excepting that on Patrick MacGill) has been conducted into fictional representations of this remarkably homogeneous group of migrants. In this chapter, I look at two novels about Irish construction workers in London, The Contractors (1994) by John B. Keane and I Could Read the Sky (1997) by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke. In addition, I discuss extracts from Keane’s autobiography, Self Portrait (1964), in order to demonstrate how an interaction takes place over a span of many years between autobiographical and fictional aspects of Keane’s writing. I also show how both novels draw on powerful discourses of exile and mythology to render differing experiences of the diasporic condition.