Learning to be Irish
by Maria C. McCarthy
Siglum Publishing. May 2025 PB. 202pp 203x127mm (5×8”) 978-1-9161733-4-7
£11.99 US$12.99 €11.99 CAN$18.99 AUS$20.99
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Learning to be Irish showcases the best new and collected writings of a child of Irish migrants. Raised in Surrey in the 1960s and ’70s, ‘the filling in the sandwich’ of a family of five children, Maria C. McCarthy dances to Irish showbands, learns rebel songs at an uncle’s knee, hears home truths, half-truths and white lies from the women that gather in her mother’s kitchen, and learns to be English after the IRA bombs two pubs in Guildford. Learning to be Irish is a search for identity, a chronicle of a lost generation, and a yearning for truths that may never be known.
Maria C. McCarthy’s Learning To Be Irish, comprising poems, stories, and memoir, is a welcome addition to a wave of second-generation Irish writers born in England. McCarthy is a particularly fine poet, and I recommend her sequence ‘Mitchelstown’ to all who are interested in the delicate relations between native and exile. Learning To Be Irish can take its place alongside the work of such writers as Ian Duhig, Shane MacGowan, and Martina Evans. A terrific book.
John O’Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, The King From Over The Water and The Servants and Other Strange Stories
Quietly devastating. A mature and truthful exploration of complex emotions, conflicting loyalties, identity, belonging. Through her mastery of different forms of writing: poetry, story, memoir, McCarthy shows us the beating heart of the second-generation Irish in England.
S.M. Jenkin, author of Fire in the Head and Unspeakable, and co-editor of Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World
About the Author
Maria C. McCarthy was born in 1959 and raised in a community of Irish migrants in Epsom, Surrey. Her Irish heritage features strongly in her writing. She is the author of two poetry collections: strange fruits and There are Boats on the Orchard; a collection of linked short stories, As Long as it Takes; and is contributing editor of Unexplored Territory. All four books are published by Cultured Llama. She is also a contributing editor of Inspired by Six Women Who Shook the World (Medway Libraries). Maria was the winner of the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2015 for her short story More Katharine than Audrey. In 2011, she co-founded Cultured Llama Publishing with her husband, Bob Carling, and was poetry and fiction editor until the press closed in 2023. She has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Kent. She lives in the Medway Towns.
www.medwaymaria.co.uk / Substack
Reviews
The Frogmore Papers reviews Learning to be Irish in Issue 106, Autumn 2025:
Maria McCarthy’s account of ‘learning to be Irish’ as a child of Irish migrants, born in England, takes many forms in this entertaining and consistently engaging collection, which comprises fiction, memoir and poetry. Learning to be Irish is a fascinating exploration of culture and identity and the connexions between them, and McCarthy writes with unfailing honesty and admirable candour. Her ‘Mitchelstown’ sequence of poems concludes: I’m Irish with an English voice,/English with an Irish heart,/floating forever between Holyhead an Dun Laoghaire…
Jeremy Page
An evocative read – 5 stars
Maria writes with great honesty and humour about her upbringing in Ireland in the 60s and 70s. Her stories will resonate with generations of Irish people, evoking vivid memories of an era shaped by emigration, religious conservatism, and shifting family expectations – a time when many faced tough choices between tradition and change, both at home and abroad. Sharon Murphy (on Amazon)
A beautiful collection – 5 stars
Readers should keep in mind that this is a collection of short stories / memoirs, not a novel. There is one slight repetition, but from a different angle, and this doesn’t detract from the emerging story of a child of Irish immigrants, and the complicated relationships and gradual unravelling that can happen in any family.
Beautifully but simply written, the content is moving because of the honesty and depth of feeling in such lines as “I deal with my pain by writing” and “the money was returned to me”. The stories evoke sympathy and some horror, but are not without humour.
I too was a teenager in the 1970s so the stories brought back memories of the attitudes of most men to girls and women at that time, and also opened my eyes to what it must have been like to be Irish in England at the time of the Guildford bombings.
Definitely a good read. Caroline in Royston (on Amazon)
Your observations, recollections and subsequent revelations bring out the importance, which I believe too, that secrets cause far more trouble than the truth. Maggie F
A vivid, forensic analysis of her experience of Irish identity, growing up as part of an Irish community in England. Full of painful human experience but dealt with bravely after years of working it out. A great achievement and testament to ontological survival in a complicated world, I’d say […] I love the detailed descriptions of life in the McCarthy household in the sixties and seventies and her opening poem. Lots of echoes of my own experience of Irish identity. Patrick
Just finished reading it – loved it. Couldn’t put it down. Steph
Keywords: memoir; poetry; prose; language; literature; fiction; short fiction; Ireland; England
