The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform is celebrating its first anniversary with a photo exhibition at the Irish Arts Center in New York. Cahir O’Doherty has a preview.

By Cahir O’Doherty

What happens when the people you expected to help you won’t?

How do you feel when you discover those same people are actually working against you?

What happens when you find out they’re preventing you from opening a door they passed through years ago themselves?

These are difficult questions, sometimes bitter ones. If you’re lucky you’ll never have to think about them.

But this generation of the Irish undocumented has not been terrifically lucky; in fact they’ve had it tougher than just about any immigration wave in recent memory, because of September 11. Everything changed in an hour.

Everyone knows what happened to the nation, but the story of what happened to the 50,000 illegal Irish living here has not been told until now.

A new photo exhibition from the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) at the Irish Arts Center offers an intimate portrait of the undocumented Irish living and working here, and it puts faces and names to a controversial subject.

The facts are straightforward. As the country struggled to take in the enormity of the 9/11 attack, the golden door to a new life in America slammed shut and it has stayed shut. New airport screening measures sealed the remaining loopholes. For the undocumented Irish living here the choice was as simple as it was painful: stay or leave.

Leave and you couldn’t return. Stay and you would miss every christening, every birthday, every Christmas, every wedding and every wake. On paper that might look like a simple trade-off, but the private emotional cost lurking beneath those stark choices is hard to understate.

So what happens when your brightest hopes seem lost? Well, that’s when bartenders, nannies and builders become political activists and organizations like ILIR are born. The group hosted its first meeting in New York on the first Friday in December of 2005.

When your back is against the wall you have to come out fighting. In the process you’ll remember that you have a voice and a story and that you’re worth fighting for. And that’s exactly the kind of fighting Irish spirit that people get behind.

So when an immigration visa reform bill finally comes it should not be forgotten that, in the main, it has been unskilled laborers who stood up and won that freedom for everyone else.

Photographers Sean McPhail and Nuala Purcell of the Irish Voice know all about it. For the past year they have both been documenting every triumph and setback on this eventful journey for the ILIR exhibition at the Irish Arts Center, which opens to the public this week. From the ILIR’s fledgling meeting in midtown Manhattan to their raucous political rallies with the most influential politicians in the nation, their cameras have recorded it all.

“These aren’t just faceless people working for a committee,” says McPhail. “They’re people like me and you. And I want to bring that reality to life, so that we’re not just this organization that no one knows anything about. The people involved in the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform are actually great craic and it’s been great working with them.”

Purcell agrees. “It’s been a wonderful experience being part of a grassroots movement. I attended two of the rallies in Washington, which launched the ILIR into the mainstream media and being the daughter of Irish immigrants, it really made me feel like I was part of something. ILIR have turned regular, everyday people into political activists.”

And what about the people in the photographs themselves? They come from every county in Ireland, and the first thing that strikes about them is how much they look like everyone else back home in Ireland. They’re just ordinary people out doing something extraordinary.

Samantha, 31, comes from Co. Meath and her husband Liam, 26, comes from Dublin. They had to get married here in the States because they couldn’t go home.

“We love everything about America,” says Liam. “We love the weather, the people, the country, but we’re afraid to settle. We joined ILIR because we had to, it was a necessity born out of frustration.

“Being illegal affects every area of our lives. You could go through an entire life without being pushed to stand up and be counted, but we’re standing up now and we’re in this 100%. If ILIR fails, we fail.”

Michael, 33, and Christine, 32, came over from Donegal in 2003. “We would have stayed at home but the Celtic Tiger never reached Falcarragh,” says Christine. “And the wages never changed all the time I worked there. In just six months the two factories I had worked at closed.”

America seemed to offer them a new beginning and they took it. “We were scared to make the move but it worked out. We’re both employed, we work hard, but we want to able to visit our families at home. That’s the hardest part.”

Big Tom, as he’s known in Yonkers where he works as a barman, has seen both sides of the situation. “I came here originally for a three week holiday and 10 years later I’m still here. I met my wife here, this is where we call home, this is where our future lies and this is where we want to be,” says Tom, 36.

“I sometimes ask myself if it’s worth all the trouble it takes to live here and so far I have to say it is. But this year has been kind of tough,” he adds. “My mother was here for a holiday earlier this year when my grandfather took sick, so she had to return to Ireland, and it was hard to leave her at the door of the airport in such a bad way – but you can’t get into the Delta terminal without a ticket now.”

He pauses for a moment and then adds, “My grandfather passed away the following Monday.”

The exhibition at the Arts Center powerfully reminds how many lives are affected and how much is at stake. Says Purcell, “When I was covering all these events I never expected to see the images as part of a traveling exhibit. But I hope they will en-lighten people about the plight of 21st century immigrants, particularly over the past year.”

History has been a part of this enterprise. The immigration reform movement that arose here in the 1980s inspired the current one, and that one took some cues from the ones that preceded it.

Memory is also a part of the equation. One hundred years ago the tradition of the “American wake” was known in every parish in Ireland.

Immigrants leaving for America knew the difficulty of the journey meant that they were unlikely to ever return, and to most people that felt like a bereavement. Here was a young person in the flush of youth that you were unlikely to ever see again.

It seemed ironic and cruel then, and it’s worse now in the age of transatlantic jet travel. The truth is that the crackdown on travel has meant the sad tradition has been revived, only now the immigrants can never return.

For many undocumented the experience has been a bitter one and the story never changes. The first wave, they contend, pulled the ladder up on the second, with all the recriminations that implies.

But for ILIR members, for the young men and women pictured in this remarkable exhibition, optimism rules and the final chapter has yet to be written.

In their photographs they look out at you with hopeful expressions, each of them a budding citizen, asking for nothing more than a chance to proudly take their place beside you in the nation they call home.

(The exhibit runs at the Irish Arts Center, 553 West 51st Street in New York, until February. Call 212-757-3318.)