Can you be loyal to two nations? It's the question posed to the Anglo-Irish class of the 1930s. Landed Protestants with | dG1fWVh3eFlsQ2V1RHM
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00:00Ireland had got rid of people like us, landed Protestants who spoke with English accents.
00:11As my father was growing up, one by one the Anglo-Irish families were being ejected.
00:17It was a polite version of ethnic cleansing. My aunts and uncles went back with me to the
00:27west of Ireland to tell me about their childhood in the 1930s.
00:33My father is a City of London computer boffin. He's 83.
00:39It was a very comfortable life, really. The only thing we didn't have was a car and a
00:46telephone and electric light. Look at the poor old gate-clodge falling down, losing its plaster
00:55all over the place.
01:03My Uncle Richard is a poet. Ireland and its bitter history has been his subject.
01:14When we entered those gates, it was like an embrace. Possessive and jealous by turns, an intense
01:26surge of excitement and joy.
01:33My cousins are the only one-time Anglo-Irish family still around here, farming their own land.
01:47We looked down this great green cathedral.
01:54But we were still holding a fort, kind of outpost of the British Empire, kind of forlorn, last survivor
02:09feeling. Surrounded by people who were different.
02:29When I first came to Milford, age seven, I was told that ancient Irish princes married their domains.
02:36That's the house and land. I wondered if my father had wanted to marry the house when he was young.
02:45Here we are, the grand old entrance.
02:50The Rangoon Prince.
02:56Yes, sir.
02:58Richard gave the house its own voice, the voice of the Anglo-Irish, full of dread, in his poem about his own birth upstairs in the house.
03:09The house speaks as Richard is emerging from his mother.
03:14I'd been expecting death by absentee owner's decay, or fire from a rebel match.
03:21Too many old relations I'd seen die in the same bedroom.
03:25Made me scared to watch.
03:29And then your birth cry came, piercing through wall behind wall.
03:34The sun transfigured all of us.
03:39The first relation to live in the house was an English soldier.
03:43The Irish rebelled in 1641, and Britain's new model army came to reconquer the Catholic colony, for Britain and for Protestants.
03:53It was the best fighting force in Europe.
03:56Led by Oliver Cromwell, it crushed all opposition, swiftly and ruthlessly.
04:03But to secure long-term control in the decades that followed, officers were settled around the country.
04:11My ancestor identified the land, claimed it under the Adventurers Act, and set up home over 300 years ago, in 1691.
04:22The first relationship to the Southeliers Act as a very girl.
04:25The next relationship is just for a long-term control.
04:27We are now on every one of those are on the same, with the same person that we have to perform with.
04:31To save that, you'll be the same.
04:33The other relationship is broken down.
04:38The end, you'll be the same.
04:39The other relationship as a native legend is just for a long time.
04:42The other relationship is that the higher-old encounter, and the other relationship is why it's not as easy.