It’s still dark when they board, the lads all biceps and GAA bags and trimmed beards, the women dressed comfortably for the journey, their eyes rimmed red after a late-night trip to the airport and an early start, but no-one is complaining.
After all, in a few hours they will be home.
Home for Christmas.
Through the year hundreds, if not thousands, of Irish workers have passed through Swedish airports on their way to construction sites. These are the men and women building our connected future and housing the memories we will make this year and every year as we gather to celebrate all over the world.
Having built the first data centres in Ireland, their expertise is in demand in Sweden, where the temperate climate and access to reliable sources of renewable energy has enticed the world’s biggest tech companies to place their servers here.
And like London and New York before them, they call on the Irish to build them.
Gone are the days of meeting outside a pub in Kilburn at dawn and hoping for a day’s casual labour. The companies and the workers on-site in Sweden are highly-skilled and very sought-after. They carry out the basics of putting up four walls and a roof, and after that the real work begins – fire-proofing, lightning-protecting, pulling enough cable to bring you to the moon and back, and doing it all quickly and efficiently and better than anyone else.
I wonder was it them that built the server on which the clip resides, the one that features my friend and neighbour, George Murphy – a great singer since before his teens, George had the honour of singing a few lines (the best few lines) from Fairytale Of New York at Shane MacGowan’s funeral.
Flanked by Glen Hansard and various Pogues and Dubliners and celebrities, George gave it all he had and the clip flew up to the cloud, copied and pasted and distributed around the world, by and through the kind of centres now reaching for the sky north of Stockholm and above the Arctic circle.
This viral moment ended up where all our photos will end up this Christmas, all the videos of kids opening presents and the home-comers entering pubs whose doors they haven’t darkened since they left to go abroad.
The DMs will be flying as the electronics that keep us connected even when we’re apart pave the last mile before we meet, however briefly, in the coming days and weeks.
The sweetness of those encounters will be soured by the knowledge that they will inevitably come to an end, and those of us who live abroad will scatter again to the four corners of the world, but our hearts will be light and our pockets full of memories in the pictures and videos taken and shared and stored in the cloud, so we can call on them in the rest of the dark days of winter.
In a few weeks the last packet of Tayto in the bottom of the bag will be eaten, the crumbs licked jealously off the foil packet, and the rashers and the sausages in the freezer will inevitably run out. The snow – here in Sweden, at least – will melt, and the O’Neills footballs and the hurls will come out again, and gradually the buds of a burgeoning Swedish-Irish community will bloom in a new spring.
Some won’t come back at all, moving on to other projects, other sites, other lives. More will come back with the intention of going home soon after, but some DMs have a greater effect than others, and their lives will change too. Having found someone to love, they will find themselves staying and all of a sudden years have past, there’s a Volvo in the driveway and kids speaking two languages and they marvel at how they came to build a data centre and ended up building a new life instead.
No matter what path life takes or how long they are here, we are the richer for having them here in Sweden, however long they have stayed – not only have they contributed to our memories of who we are as Irish people in Sweden, they have built a place for us to store them and keep them for the future.
Merry Christmas one and all, and the happiest of New Years – to those who are set to leave. we say tack och välkommen åter, and to those who are coming back, fáilte ar ais.
Enjoy the break, because there’s work to be done, whether that be building data centres or our communities …
Thanks to all who have listened to or appeared on the “Irish In Sweden” podcast in 2023 – we look forward to bringing you even more episodes and events in 2024!