There is a trail near Maghera known as the “Immigrant Trail”. It follows the route that countless men, women and children once took on their way to Derry port, bound for Canada and America. They went not with much choice, but with desperation. famine at their backs and the hope of survival ahead.
Along the road are three bridges with unofficial names in Irish: Osnaí (Sighs), Slán (Goodbyes), and Deora (Tears). Families walked with their sons and daughters that far, knowing they would likely never see them again. At the first bridge came a sigh of resignation. At the second, the formal goodbye. At the third, tears. Mothers would slip a rock from their own fields into their child’s hand, a last tether to home. At the top of Carntogher, where home slipped from view, those stones were laid down in a cairn that remains to this day.
Between 1845 and 1849, two million Irish left, a quarter of the population. They arrived in strange cities with an accent that marked them out, sometimes only a little English, clutching meagre belongings, often greeted with suspicion and hostility. They were called lazy, told to “get a job,” and resented for their poverty.
And yet today, in Ireland, there are voices echoing those same words about others who come here seeking safety, food, and a new start. We seem to have forgotten: we were once the people in boats. We were once the strangers arriving on unfamiliar shores, hoping only for a chance to live.
The cairn on Carntogher still stand, a silent witness to the journeys of the hungry and desperate. Perhaps they can remind us that the story of migration is not “theirs,” it is ours.