Anne O’Callaghan and The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians
Anne O'Callaghan
Anne O’Callaghan is the director of The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians. Originally from Co. Monaghan, in this interview she discusses the Center’s mission and how her childhood on the Border with Northern Ireland has influenced the path toward her current work, although it wasn’t part of a pre-determined plan.
Since The Welcoming Center opened in 2003, it has assisted over 6,000 clients, of all races, ethnicities, and religions, and representing about 120 countries. Its mission is “to be a centralized employment and referral center for the region’s growing immigrant community by promoting immigrant participation in the area’s political, social, and economic life.” The Center now has offices in Center City, West Philadelphia, and Upper Darby, which assist clients with tasks ranging from getting a driver’s license to handling work authorization.
The Welcoming Center is now listed on Zagat’s list of best non-profits and the European Union’s guide to organizations assisting immigrants. Further details on the Center can be found at their website, www.welcomingcenter.org.
R: Could you describe the mission of The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians?
A: We see ourselves as an economic development, work force development, and centralized referral location.
R: How does this differ from other organizations or approaches that were used in the past?
A: We work with all religions, genders, nationalities and ethnic groups. Most immigrant organizations or service providers are either ethnic- or faith-based. For me the magic of America is that your religion really doesn’t matter. It should not keep you out of a job. It should not keep you out of being part of a community. That is magic if you come from Northern Ireland, at the time that I did, in 1970.
R: What were your goals at the time?
A: I came here as a student. I was a physical therapist, working with brain-injured children, and had read about the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, where John F. Kennedy’s father was treated after his stroke was treated. That got a lot of press in Ireland. I came out here to Chestnut Hill, to do a course for five months, with the full intention of returning.
R: So you got a leave of absence?
A: Yes, I took six months, with the option of taking a second six months. My dream was to see America, to take a look at this program, to bring back the skills, and while I was here, to really get to understand the Civil Rights Movement, and to learn how they managed to get Civil Rights enshrined in law, after all the difficulties. I had every intention of going back to Ireland.
I met my husband soon after I came here, in Dennis Clark’s kitchen, actually! I did go back to Ireland and took a second leave of absence. By the time I was two or three months into that, the romance had progressed far enough that it looked like I was going to stay here, and so I let my employers know.
R: Did you figure out how the Civil Rights Movement became enshrined in law or is it still elusive?
A: In Ireland, we were reading about Martin Luther King. We had seen a horrific cover of Life magazine, Emmet Till’s beaten and bruised body, and his mother standing over his coffin. I’ve never forgotten that.
These things were very shocking, but yet for all that, the law did get changed, and progress was made. I found America was full of contradictions. Enormously generous on the one hand, and on the other hand, very harsh and unforgiving. I was shocked by driving through North Philadelphia.
R: Can you tell me more about growing up in Ireland?
A: I was born and reared in Ballybay, Co. Monaghan, about six miles south of the Border. Monaghan, of course, is one of the counties of Ulster that is not in Northern Ireland, and you were very aware of that from the moment you were born. You knew where you were. Your religion defined you, the schools you went to, the people you played with, the dances you went to, and how you were socialized.
I’m the oldest of seven children. My mother was a teacher and my father had a small construction business.
I went to St. Bridget’s National School. There were two nuns and my mother, three classes in each room, about 200 students altogether. In desks that were meant to hold two, there would be three of us squished in, where necessary. Ballybay had only around five or six hundred people but some kids in the countryside would walk four to five miles to school.
I grew up in the 1940s. I was shipped off to a boarding school in 1954, run by the St. Louis nuns in Carrickmacross. Only 15 miles away, further south, but there was no transportation. From Ballybay, you had to be a boarder, there was no bus that would take you back and forth.
R: It’s famous for lace, isn’t it?
A: Yes, Grace Kelly’s veil. So I spent six years there, did my Leaving Cert, and got a wonderful education, we did Latin, French, and all our subjects trí Ghaeilge [through the medium of Irish].
R: Even Latin and French?
A: Yes, and science. One of the interesting things is they didn’t do higher level maths because it was a girls’ school. The boys got the trigonometry. We did algebra and geometry and that was all that was required of us.
To matriculate for university, if you didn’t have the maths, you had to have Latin.
R: Did you ever miss that higher math?
A: I wasn’t particularly interested in math, or anything special. You went to school. You had to go to school. You did what you were told, pretty much. You tried to find ways to break the rules without being caught – that was the main thing!
R: It reminds me of Edna O’Brien and The Country Girls. Her main character didn’t really last all that long in her boarding school and I assume it’s semi-autobiographical. In the 1940s.
A: You know Nuala O’Faolain went to St. Louis Convent, Monaghan. Her book, Are You Somebody? starts off with that. The St. Louis nuns were a French order of nuns, very determined that you’d get an education, whether you wanted it or not.
R: As a child, were you very aware of living so close to the Border?
A: Yes, we were very aware of that, very aware of the B-Specials, the forerunners of the UDF, Ulster Defense Force. Some of them were our Protestant neighbors and they were armed by the government, and we knew who they were. Some of them were our Protestant neighbors, but they would put on masks, and patrol the Border, and stop Catholics, at gunpoint. I remember one case. My father had a car he drove us to up near Dundalk every Christmas. He’d take us there, the seven of us, like stepstairs, to have photographs taken.
And coming back, there was a part of the road that was “unapproved”, near Cullaville, only a couple hundred feet. It went through Northern Ireland and didn’t have the Customs barricade. We were stopped. It was pouring rain. We were stopped at gunpoint by the B-Specials. They made us all get out of the car.
I was 12 or 13. And the youngest was a baby, two months old, there was another one, a year and two months old. We had to stand in the rain while the car was being searched until we were wet through. It was harassment and then we got back into the car, frozen with the cold and wet to the skin.
And then a few days later, one of the men in Ballybay, came up to my father and he said, “Johnny, I’m very sorry about the other night, but there was nothing I could do. I was with a couple of boys from Antrim and I couldn’t do anything,” and he apologized.
R: That’s quite remarkable. What is it like then, when you’re still living all together in this fairly small town?
A: You recognize, Roslyn, you know, you know who people are. It’s almost in your DNA. You know. You’d speak to them. Everybody talked to everybody else. You knew who they were and they knew who you wore. And my father would say about this man, “He’s a decent man. He wouldn’t want to hurt us.” That’s just the way it is. So you had a deep awareness.
There was another thing that went on, economically. Six miles to the south of us was the Lough Egish creamery, where they made butter, and very good butter it was considered to be. Our government subsidized the butter and sent it six miles in the other direction into Northern Ireland. You could go down to Northern Ireland and buy a pound of the Lough Egish butter, and it said it right on it, and you could buy it for two and nine pence. And if you went into your own town, ín Ballybay, you paid four and ninepence.
So of course we smuggled butter and cigarettes, and anything else! Now I wasn’t involved in smuggling cigarettes but I was involved in smuggling butter! There were very few women Customs officers, so girls would wear something loose, with a belt, and you would stop the car a little before the Border, and put your butter in close to your body, under your belt. And they knew, they could see it. And they’d say, “Do you have any butter? Do you have any cigarettes?” “No, no, we don’t have anything.” They couldn’t put a hand on you. As soon as you got away from them, you stopped quick and you took it out because you didn’t want it to melt.
So, yeah, we knew, of course. And then there were all kinds of stories in the town. There were all kinds of people who made their living. We didn’t make our living through smuggling, but we certainly weren’t above smuggling butter.
R: There’s a scene like that in the movie, The Playboys, with a pig.
A: There was a family in Ballybay that smuggled pigs all the time, back and forth. Sometimes they’d get caught and they’d be waiting for them. So what they’d do is let the pigs out, running all over the place. And they’d lose their truck. It would be picked up and they wouldn’t get it back. But they made enough money. They’d get another truck. It was a funny place to grow up in. That’s just the way it was.
R: Do you think that childhood influenced your decisions, first to go into the field of therapy, and then to go into your current field? It wasn’t an easy kind of childhood, to have grown up there.
A: No it probably wasn’t, but we had no clue. It was all we knew. In many ways it was a wonderful preparation for life because you had to live in close quarters with the enemy, the Protestants, with the B-Specials. And you had to deal with the reality of what we considered an occupation, they took our country and our land, and they were stopping us at the Border, at gunpoint, sometimes, and we knew who was in the IRA. We talked about it, us girls, sitting in St. Louis Convent, Carrickmacross. We’d sit at recreation time, and we had no newspaper, no comic books, no radio, no television, we could have music, and we’d talk. And the big topics of conversation were, “What would you do to get rid of the British occupation? To reunite Ireland?
“What would you be able to put up with? And if you were picked up, what torture could you withstand?
The nuns were big on telling us about Maria Goretti and martyrdom. For us, they were very connected, dying for your country and dying for your religion. It was the highest calling. Dying for your religion was number one and dying for your country was a close second. To reunite Ireland. We used to sit there and recite Patrick Pearse’s poetry.
R: You’d think girls that age would be talking about boys?
A: We didn’t see boys! We would have liked to have been talking about boys. You wished! By the time you were sixteen, you started to see boys, and be more aware, but at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, we didn’t. When we’d go on walks, we’d go like a big crocodile. Well you’d always hope they’d walk you past the Brothers’ School, where you could see some boys, and that would be a big topic of conversation.
We were very idealistic, very interested in history, in Irish history, and in religion, and in our identity, and I think growing up on the Border, it mattered more. I have friends from college who grew up in other places and they did not at all have the same sense of nationalism and their Catholicism that we did. It was your identity and you knew who you were and you knew who they were.
It was an interesting place. It was sort of a “cloud of unknowing,” we really didn’t know. You’d go up in the North, and they were living your experience, but they had more social services than we did at that time, and they had free education through secondary and college, which we didn’t at that time. So there were some differences, but it was still your identity, who you were. You had to go to school through age fourteen.
R: That was state-funded?
A: Yes, but not the secondary school. If you did go to secondary school, you had to pass Irish to get your Leaving Cert. And that stopped a lot of people, in our school maybe only 10%, other places it would be more.
You didn’t get your Leaving Cert without passing Irish. You could pass everything else, get 100% in every other subject. But in our school, we were very Irish-focused and we spoke Irish, so most of us passed.
R: If you saw the Sisters in passing, outside of the classroom, would you also speak Irish?
A: Yes, you bowed to them and said “Dia’s Muire dhuit, a Shiúr.” And if they were mad at you, they would sweep past you, and swing their beads and try and hit you, and if they weren’t [mad at you] they’d chat with you. Or you’d say, “Go mbeannaí Dia dhuit, a Shiúr.”
And then I decided I was going to go to college. I was so sick of nuns so I decided I was not going to go to UCD [University College Dublin] where there were nuns. I wanted to go to Trinity, where there were no nuns. They were Protestants! To go to Trinity I had to get a dispensation and it didn’t go down well at home.
R: Was there an issue with money with that as well?
A: No, just the religion. It was mostly not religion, it was nuns, and I ended up to be very friendly with all kinds of nuns. I love nuns, but anyway, after six years, I had some issues. Fair play was one. It was very much a caste system in these boarding schools. There were girls there that we, as boarders, were not allowed to talk to, probably coming out of the orphanages, polishing and cleaning and working. Girls the same age as us. And we knew intuitively there was something unfair about that, but that was the system. There was very much a caste system in its way in Ireland. That was the way it was. You went to a boarding school. You were the boarder and you were different. They were the … help.
R: It sounds like you should write a full memoir!
A: It was a completely different world but it really left me with a real commitment to social justice and a real commitment to having the separation of church and state. I think it’s critically important and I think we embody that here.
I think that if you grew up in Ireland when I did, or indeed any time, but especially the years, that I did, and you look at our history, we used to say, “You’re born for the boat.” There were no jobs, so we, as a race, as a culture, went all over the place, and we did that historically, and we were accepted to a greater or lesser extent, often a lesser extent, and so we have it in our genetic memory. We understand “No Irish need apply.” We understand discrimination. We lived it, in the North. You couldn’t vote, the Catholics, the gerrymandering and those things. You understood it, and so, why wouldn’t you then bring those principles with you?
We’ll look for our common humanity and I think as Irish people we should be doing that. Yeah, we worked hard, to bring certain skills to the table, but we’ve also been given a great deal, and I think things now like the Irish getting involved with the inner city parishes, I think is a perfect circle. And I think that the Welcoming Center being founded and run by this Irish woman [chuckles], is also what we should be doing. We should be welcoming everybody. It is what we should be doing. And demographically we need the immigrants. We’re the third oldest state in the nation, with a decreasing of under-17 year olds, and an increasing number of over-65 years old. We need everyone, as we always have. It was ever thus.
The problem is, today, that the immigrants are not European, mostly. I’ve had people say, “You’re not an immigrant. I’m not against you.”I’m white and I speak English.
R: So what do you say?
A: “Well, I know I’m not brown or black and I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m still an immigrant.” And they don’t like it when you say, “I know I’m not brown or black,” because you’re saying what they’re not saying.
R: Everybody in this country, except the Native American, is an immigrant.
A: They also may say, “My grandparents, well, they got in line.” “When did your grandparents come in?”
“Oh, 1910.” Well, there was no line then. You could come into this country. You had to not have tuberculosis but you could arrive, you didn’t need papers. You did need to clear the health hurdles.
R: Well, that basically ties up the two directions I wanted to go, your background and how it led to the Welcoming Center, and even the name of the organization.
A: This wasn’t a plan, you know. I had a small business and I was working as a physical therapist.
Now, here we are, The Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians, with four locations and 25 or 26 on the staff.
R: It’s also interesting that your first field was therapy, in the medical arena, but this is therapy for society.
A: Yes, and the skills involved, you cannot be a good physical therapist without being a good problem-solver.
And I think what you bring to solving one kind of problem, you can take to any problem. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful board and a great staff. You never know, Roslyn, you get up in the morning, and you go to work, and the door opens, and before you know it, this is what you’re doing.
Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians
One Penn Center, 13th Floor
1617 John F. Kennedy Blvd.
Philadelphia, PA 19103
(215) 557-2626
Delaware County Office
7000 Walnut St.
Upper Darby PA 19082
610-734-7715
www.welcomingcenter.org