I was not present when Kenneth Brannagh’s new film ‘Belfast’ got its first showing in… er… Belfast recently but I am greatly looking forward to seeing it. In fact, I have read many of the reviews which are almost entirely positive, whilst they often acknowledge that it is imbued with more than a dollop of rose-tinted sentimentality. Based on Brannagh’s early life in the city it deals with his family’s decision to emigrate to England in the late 1960s as the Troubles exploded around them. It is being touted as a potential Oscar nominee having already picked up a number of significant awards.

I too left Belfast in the late 1960s when I won a Belfast Education Authority scholarship to go to an international sixth form college in South Wales. After two years I moved on to London to go to university and then have my first permanent job there. Unfortunately, unlike our Ken, I did not go on to become a world-famous actor and director but returned home in late 1973 and began my teaching career in the following year. 

The people of this island have had a long association with migration. Emigrants of Irish and Ulster-Scots descent have, for centuries, travelled all over the world in search of a better life and have settled in hundreds of different countries where they have often successfully integrated into and contributed to their new communities.

My much older brother and sister emigrated to Canada in the early 1960s, became naturalised Canadians, settled and raised their families there. In 1974 when my parents retired, they too emigrated to Canada and left me the only member of the family back on home soil. They came home a few years later because my mother could not settle.

However, a long time before that – in and around 1900 – my paternal grandfather moved the other way and brought his family from Scotland to live in Belfast. Indeed, my father was the only one of this immigrant family to be born outside Scotland. The family tradition continues with my daughter and her family living in Manchester and my son and his family now in Dublin.

I guess, in modern parlance, these relations of mine have all been economic migrants and there is hardly a family in Northern Ireland or the Republic that does not have similar stories to tell. The son of the family next door to us growing up emigrated to Australia and my brother’s best friend, from around the corner, went to South Africa.

So, it is not surprising that I feel a growing sense of anger, sadness, shame and despair when I hear of men women and children dying in the English Channel in their desperate attempts to get to Britain. My outrage intensifies when I learn that the legal mechanisms for people to come into the UK are not functional or are non-existent. It seems that the anti-immigrant sentiments that did so much to fuel Brexit in England have not gone away. 

Even when other European countries including Germany, Spain, Greece, and Italy have been the recipients of many more migrants, the UK Government insists on seeing themselves as the victim in all of this. They are keen to blame France and the EU for not protecting the border that they claimed Brexit would allow them to control themselves.

 Most of the people trying to enter are from Iran, Iraq and Syria and the vast majority claim asylum, if they make it, because they are not allowed to claim asylum from outside the UK. The UK Home Secretary calls them “economic migrants” as if that is itself a crime when they are mainly fleeing war, disease and famine and to ensure the safety and survival of their families. 

These days I can look out over Belfast Lough to see the Stena Line ferry taking all sorts of people across the water for all sorts of reasons and I remember 1968 when I was on the Heysham boat beginning my own little migration crossing the same stretch of water. But I guess I was legal then, and safe.

Whether we call them economic migrants or asylum seekers or illegal or undocumented immigrants, they are all desperate human beings at the end of their tether who surely have the same right to migrate as we all do. They need our help, understanding, encouragement and support as they seek a better life for themselves and their families and, God help us, they should never, ever be allowed to drown in the English Channel.