‘Wales must change its attitude to towards the worldwide Welsh community’

Martin Shipton

Wales needs to change its approach to its own diaspora to get the maximum benefit out of those with Welsh family connections who live overseas, according to a businessman who has spent his career working abroad.

Spencer John, group CEO of the advisory firm Ethos-Chain, with offices in Dubai and Swansea, has published a lengthy article on LinkedIn that examines why Ireland has profited much more from its overseas community than Wales, and suggests improvements that could be made.

He writes: “In the anthracite fields of north-eastern Pennsylvania in the 1870s a man’s nationality could often be inferred from his job title; the mine boss was Welsh, the fireboss was Welsh, the skilled cutter working the seam and paid by the ton was frequently Welsh, and the labourer hauling the spoil, the man on the roads and the canals and the raw end of the work, was Irish.

“Both groups had crossed the same ocean into the same valleys within roughly the same generation, one arriving with a trade and taking charge, the other arriving with nothing and taking orders.

“A century and a half later, the descendants of those labourers run one of the most effective diaspora networks in existence, a machine that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for causes in Ireland and that delivered American diplomatic weight to the Northern Ireland peace process at the moment it was needed. The descendants of the mine bosses hold occasional dinners.

“This is the puzzle, and it has nothing to do with talent or with affection. Ask a successful Welsh person abroad whether they love Wales and you will receive a fervent yes, delivered with the anthem and possibly with tears; ask what they have done for Wales in the past five years and the answer is usually a donation, a rugby ticket and a vague intention. Something in the machinery is absent, and has been absent for so long that the absence now reads as the natural order of things rather than as a failure of design.

“The cleanest statement of the difference is that the Irish left as a people while the Welsh left as individuals.”

John contrasts the decline in Ireland’s population in the 19th century with the rise in the Welsh population.

Emigration

Ireland’s population fell from around 8.2 million in 1841 to under 4.4 million by 1911, with emigration becoming the default condition of Irish life for four further generations after the famine years of 1845 to 1852. Wales did something close to the opposite: across the same decades we see Wales functioning as one of the great receiving societies of the industrial world, the south Wales coalfield absorbing inward migration at a rate that in the first decade of the 20th century was approached only by the United States, with the Welsh population roughly doubling between 1851 and 1911 by pulling people in from rural Wales, the English border counties, Ireland, Italy and Spain.

“Welsh emigration was consequently selective from the beginning,” writes John, “and after 1944, with the grammar schools and then the universities operating as an efficient extraction system, it became something close to meritocratic export; the academically able identified at 11, processed, and dispatched. ‘Get your education and get out’ has been said in Welsh valleys, in a tone somewhere between advice and grief, for four generations. I for one remember my Nan drumming that line into me as a kid and I can still hear her saying that now if i close my eyes and think back.

“A skilled emigrant integrates. He is hired for what he knows, promoted on merit, and absorbed within a generation into the receiving society’s respectable middle, and he therefore does not need his countrymen; no benevolent society, no fighting fund, no gang boss, no parish priest to vouch for him, no political machine to find him work in exchange for a vote. He needs none of the apparatus that unskilled and despised immigration is compelled to construct in order to eat.

“The Irish had to build all of it, and did: county associations, burial societies, trade unions, the parish, the ward, Tammany Hall, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and a Catholic school system that eventually rivalled the state’s. None of this was cultural sentiment. It was infrastructure built under duress by people with no alternative.

“Here is the part most often missed, and the part that matters most, since it explains why Irish institutional density did not decay as its holders prospered. That machinery was built by labourers and inherited by lawyers, so that three generations on, when the Irish-American grandchildren had become senators, judges, network executives and owners of football franchises, an apparatus already existed for them to chair, to fund and to be honoured by.

“The Ireland Funds, established in 1976 and now operating across a dozen countries, were founded by Tony O’Reilly, a corporate chief executive, and Dan Rooney, proprietor of the Pittsburgh Steelers; neither man had ever swung a pick. Irishness did not thin out as its holders rose, because institutions existed that made Irishness prestigious at the top of the ladder as well as at the bottom.

“Wales skipped the clustering stage, and when Welsh emigrants and their children succeeded, as they conspicuously did, there was nothing for them to join.

“The Welsh abroad did build a real culture, and it deserves recording rather than patronising. There were Welsh chapels across Pennsylvania and Ohio, in Melbourne and Ballarat, in Liverpool and Patagonia; there were eisteddfodau held on American soil, including one at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; there were gymanfaoedd canu drawing thousands, and a Welsh-language press in the United States of which Y Drych, founded in 1851, was the longest-lived.

“It was dense, literate and proud, and it vanished almost completely within two generations of the language going, because the vehicle that carried it could not survive the crossing; congregational governance cannot replicate without a critical mass of committed local members, and Welsh-medium worship cannot outlive Welsh-speaking children. The features that made Welsh identity thickest at home; the language, the chapel, the locality, the attachment to a particular valley rather than to a nation, were precisely the features that would not travel.

“The second adhesive was hostility. The Irish in America and in Britain were Catholic, visibly othered, politically suspect and subject to sustained discrimination, and nothing preserves a group identity so reliably as being refused entry to somebody else’s, whereas in the Welsh case we see nothing comparable at all, since the Welsh abroad were Protestant, English-speaking within a generation, and phenotypically invisible; nobody obstructed their assimilation, so they assimilated. Being disliked kept the Irish Irish.

“In Ireland’s case we see an identity converted into a high-status asset over the course of a century, the work proceeding through the church hierarchy, machine politics, the trade union leadership, Hollywood and finally the White House, so that by 1960 being Irish in America was an asset, by 1990 it was fashionable, and today it is claimed cheerfully by people with a single great-grandparent and a preference for stout.

“Welshness in British life never made that ascent and remains tethered to the industrial working class, to the pit and the chapel and the male voice choir, and to a register of English-language condescension that has never quite been retired. A successful Welsh person in London or Dubai or New York consequently experiences their Welshness as something transcended rather than something displayed, reading as a charming provenance detail about a grandfather underground rather than as a credential worth producing in a professional setting.”

Status

John then suggests what Wales could do better: “Status in a scarce currency is the cheapest and highest-yielding instrument available, and Wales barely uses it. Honours nominations should flow outward rather than inward; honorary fellowships and degrees from Welsh universities should go to diaspora figures as a matter of routine; a named awards structure with a hard entry bar should exist and should be difficult to get into. People who have money are not short of money, they are short of recognition that money cannot buy, and Ireland industrialised that understanding 40 years ago whilst Wales continues to treat recognition as something reserved for residents.

“Appointments are the second instrument, and they cost nothing at all. Wales fills hundreds of appointable positions each year across boards, trusteeships, advisory councils, visiting professorships and judging panels, and it almost never appoints from beyond its own borders; the appointment forms frequently assume a Welsh address and the interview processes assume physical attendance. An appointed person is invested in a way that a donor never is, because they carry responsibility rather than having merely written a cheque, and the obligation runs for the length of the term.

“The third instrument is access, and here the point is easily misunderstood. Nobody of consequence wants a photograph with a minister. What do they want instead? The ability to reach a Welsh person in São Paulo from Singapore in one telephone call, which means the product of a diaspora network is the other members rather than the country, and which means the thing being built is a marketplace requiring curation, a membership bar and quality control on both sides of every introduction. That is the opposite of how Welsh diaspora convening has generally been run, and it is why the rooms fill with people who cannot help each other.

“Deal flow is the only offer that scales financially rather than sentimentally: pre-screened opportunities, companies raising, university spinouts, sites, co-investment alongside the Development Bank of Wales, presented to an investment committee that gets first look at something with real upside rather than to an audience at a pitch day. Alongside it sits the most neglected offer of all, which is something for the children.

“The second generation is where diaspora identity is won or lost permanently, and summer schools, language immersion, a residential fortnight in Wales for the teenage children of members, university pathways and internships all buy a parent’s loyalty in exchange for something that shapes their child. Ireland understands as well that the ancestor and the parish deserve honouring alongside the achiever, which is why its genealogical infrastructure is so good, and why a documented connection to a named place is worth building for people whose grandparents left with nothing.

“None of it works without two enablers that are unglamorous and non-negotiable. Somebody must own the relationships, because senior people try once, and if a first approach disappears into a slow inbox they never return and they tell their peers; this is a sales function with named owners and response-time discipline, and Wales does not currently resource it as one.

“Somebody must also measure the thing. Ireland treats its diaspora as foreign policy, with a published strategy, a minister of state carrying the portfolio since 2014 and a budget line that survives scrutiny, whereas nobody in Wales can presently state what the diaspora is worth or what any intervention returned, which is exactly why the work never survives a budget round.

‘Remaking themselves’

“The historian Gwyn Alf Williams argued that the Welsh have survived by making and remaking themselves in generation after generation, with nothing about their continuation ever guaranteed. The diaspora is one more remaking and an unusually cheap one, given that the people already exist, the affection already exists, and the talent is already assembled and in most cases at the peak of its influence and its capacity to be useful.

“The Irish built their institutions because they had no alternative. Wales, having been spared that necessity by its own nineteenth-century prosperity, now has to do the harder thing and build them deliberately, starting with a register of who these people actually are, which is unglamorous, prior to everything else, and has still not been done.”

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