It was the late 1970s when Bartley Duggan fled to London from the west of Ireland, taking the boat from Dublin without a backward glance. Home had been a remote Irish-speaking corner of County Galway, “10 miles from the nearest shop”, where Duggan, his parents and 10 siblings shared a tiny, three-room cottage on a smallholding up a mountain.
Teachers and priests were sadistic, and the poverty was grinding and inescapable: “It wasn’t all lovey-dovey, so it wasn’t,” he recalls. In England, however, he had been told there was plenty of work. So Duggan packed a bag, cut his ties and though he is now 66, he has never been back.
