Like many people, I have family who aren’t family in the formal sense of the word, but who are in every way that matters. For the McTagues, this was especially true of “Margaret and Mike in Ireland”, as we always called them (because we also had “Margaret and Mike in Telford”, just to confuse matters).
Margaret and Mike in Ireland became part of the family through my nan and grandad. All four of them had grown up in Catholic orphanages dotted across Britain and Ireland. My nan was 16 when she met Margaret, who was just six at the time – a lost little soul who came to be like a younger sister to my nan. Later, my grandad arrived in Birmingham, having found work there through the Church, where he met my nan. Some years afterwards, Mike arrived from Ireland and became part of the family too. It was there that he met Margaret, and the rest is history.
Each family has its own genesis story, but this is mine: the fixed point from which everything else has been built. Of the four, my grandad was the first to leave us, a few years ago, having lived a remarkable life. His mother left Ireland to have him in England in the 1920s, trying her best to keep him but ultimately having to place him in an orphanage when she entered service in the 1930s. He later served in the Second World War before meeting the love of his life on his return. “My life began when I met your nan,” he would say, tearfully, whenever we asked about his childhood, much of which he had blocked from memory. Last week, Margaret became the second of the four to pass: the lost little girl with her thumb in her mouth who grew up to become a mother and grandmother to a beautiful family in Ireland.
As a child, of course, the magnitude of this was impossible for me to grasp. I remember visiting Tullamore – where Margaret and Mike had returned at some point before I was born – bobbing for apples and generally having fun. We went back a few months ago for Mike’s 80th. We flicked through pictures from his childhood in Offaly, and discovered how his mother had died in childbirth, leaving Mike and her seven other children with their widowed father. It was like staring into a lost, ancient world – and yet this was all within a single lifetime of today.
Now, it is hard not to marvel at the scale of the changes that have taken place in that lifetime, most of which, of course, have been for the better. Yet, as a parent, I often think about how my grandparents were able to survive such tough and loveless childhoods, and go on to build lives of joy and stability, with steady jobs and secure family homes. Would they have been able to build such lives today, I wonder. The outcomes for children in care are so appalling that it is hard to know. But even putting aside such extremes, even the possibility of social mobility – once so common, perhaps even the defining experience of postwar Britain – now seems increasingly rare. The class into which you are born seems far harder to escape than it was 80 years ago. How is this so?
Part of the appeal of Andy Burnham, I have begun to think, is that he talks in warm, nostalgic terms about this particular aspect of society that seems to have been lost: the social mobility and security of the postwar world. When I profiled him at length last year, he spoke about the things from his childhood that I also remember from my own, but which have largely disappeared for my children: the council-run leisure centres and holiday clubs; the affordable homes; the apparent social cohesion of that time.
Perhaps this is all nostalgia, the easy memories of childhood. Keir Starmer talked in similar terms at times, though never in a way that seemed to capture people’s imaginations. As I write in my political obituary of the departing Prime Minister, how Burnham differs from Starmer is really in the extent to which he is encapsulating a distinctly northern account of our recent history. His challenge will be somehow to turn this into a national story that everyone can get behind. Starmer could not do so, for different reasons. Burnham must if he is to stand a chance of remaining in power longer than his predecessor.
For my part, I intend to keep my nostalgic memories of childhood alive by reliving them through my children – and by regularly returning home to the north, and, of course, to Tullamore.
[Further reading: After Keir Starmer]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentI’m the son of Irish immigrants who came over in the 1950s. I remember the 1960s as an optimistic time. My dad worked in a ball bearing factory in Luton as a lathe operator and we lived on a brand new housing estate in the north of Luton. Manufactirung industry was strong. My dad had a mortgage and my mum worked on a trading estate to bring in some extra cash. New schools were being built and there were lots of kids to be educated. Univerisity was free but there were very few places. In the 1960s there was an expansion of the university sector as the government decided the country needed a more well trained workforce. You could play outside in parks and run up and down the street. there were few distractions except for the telly. The most important thing was that the UK had more control over things. There were lots of local UK companies dependent on UK and Commonwealth workers. Today it’s all changed……manufacturing industry has all but gone and the UK companies that supported the economy. Working class communities got uppended by Thatcher and finance now rules the economy or what is left of it. Global companies now hire from a global workfore and some may choose to be in the UK but then again they may move somewhere else. Economic like is contingent in the extreme. There are too many distractions now for young people and life has a pessimistic tone. It will take a lot to turn it around but I’m willing to give it a go.