This is a very thorny subject - for the Irish in British construction (or perhaps anywhere?) was addiction to 'the dhrink' down to individual weakness, was it built into the hiring system, was it pre-emigration conditioning, or was/is it a flaw in the Irish national character? Or a composite of all these things...

Would it be straining this forum to offer a few quotes from a paper I gave at the Meriman Summer School a few years ago called 'Connaughtmen And Horned Cattle To The Far Platform: Irish Navvies & The Culture of Migration'?

Don't know who moderates this discussion but I'll understand if this is too much. Here goes ...

Navvy quotes re. drink

'In their youth, having escaped the petty tyrannies of priests, parents, and community back home in rural Ireland, they revelled in an unaccustomed freedom but failed to replace the supportive framework of family and community with something similar in Britain. At the same time, having been educated to regard the British as 'the old enemy', they evinced no sense of civic responsibility towards the host society. Often theirs was virtually an 'outlaw' mentality ('They taught us to hate England – and then they sent us over here!').

The seeming camaraderie of the building site was tenuous and temporary although peer pressures, for example to prove ones self a hard drinker or fighter, could become a new tyranny for anyone not naturally so inclined. Efforts to advance, for example by becoming a gangerman or subbie, carried connotations of assumed superiority which in turn provoked resentment and rejection

"When I looked at my husband, and looked at all the rest, and at my children's       friends, I thought it was me, then I thought it was England, and eventually it dawned on me that it was Ireland, had done all this to them…I realised that the harm was done before they ever left. England added to it, but it wasn't the cause of it…

When my children were younger, I had to explain why their father was like that; that he was from another country. If you're Irish, you've got to admit that that is Ireland, and that's the way it brings up its young…Yet they were expected to go out into the world and behave normally - but they can't; they don't trust anyone.

And the fellas were living a lie too; they weren't supposed to be men, out drinking and dancing and chatting up girls, or whatever…They just don't know how to face anything, because they were never told about anything, and they were never allowed to ask for anything; because if you asked, you were a failure.

The men won't face reality; if they can't get the material things, have it there on show, they live in dreams - all in the mind…And the more stable ones eventually crack up; its not that they crack up, they come to their senses, wake up to reality. They've been living under this stress for so long, and it suddenly dawns on them that they were tricked that it was all a lie…

And while they were told that England was a place where you could be yourself, they found out that, if you're Irish and need the support of your own kind to survive, as the "Westies" who work in construction always do, then you can't be yourself - they won't let you. You want to make a stand, and speak out against it, and they won't let you speak out; so you become an outsider…

`Whatever way they were brought up, there's a lot of bitterness, and spite, and jealousy in them…So much so that it can eat away at them, and it can destroy them, and any relationships they might have… They end up old, and bitter, and alone; they've worked so hard for something better, but they never get that thing that's better, because of their own selves…'
Where were these men coming from? The views of an anonymous Irish subbie, a very wealthy man, were recorded in Jackson's 1964 work, The Irish in Britain:
"And then coming to England with the lads and sticking together, being afraid to talk to the English girls, and all the time this brooding thing of history…well, it didn't help you know in so-called integrating'.   
`Mind you, we were all very sensitive and unsure then…we might have a meal, but never in a place that looked "proper", with table cloths and so on. We'd be scared to go into a place like that, even on Sundays with our best suits on, in case they'd throw us out for not knowing how to behave properly at table…Sometimes now I go for a stroll around Camden Town, after Mass on a Sunday, and the lads are still there…atin' away without a word between them, stuffin' mixed grills down their gollops…and I'm glad them days are behind me".

Joe McGarry, an ex-navvy and reformed alcoholic, had this take on it:
"An awful lot of Irishmen - some of the finest of men, 18, 25, 27 years of age, really handsome men, afraid to talk to a woman or an English person, riddled with fear…I've seen them go into a caff and, if there was a young woman of their own age behind the counter, they could not talk to her. They had to knock each other out to prove they weren't afraid. And it was Ireland that did that to them'

'The people who did have a sense of self, who were true individuals, became the millionaires, while I was standin' down a hole, to get money, to buy drink, so that I could fit in, belong, be 'normal', be 'one of us'. If you didn't maintain this togetherness you weren't part of 'our little group'; you were 'one of them', whoever 'they' were. If you didn't drink your money at night, you were seen as mean - there was somethin' wrong with you…Now I know I'm an island of self, between two places, and I have to identify my own self - what I am, what I can do'.

John Docherty, a Donegal-born director of Tarmac Construction, also had strong views concerning the Irish class system:
"When I first came over my mother was ashamed to let it be known that I was in London, because it might be thought that I had been in trouble with the law back home. In those days it was commonplace for a first offender, if male, to be given a choice by the courts of either going to gaol or going to England'