‘If the time comes we can step in and help’ – new organisation hopes to reconnect elderly Irish diaspora with family here

Erin’s Call launched this month and comes as another support organisation, Safe Home Ireland, said it was dealing with increasingly complex cases of Irish people wishing to move home from overseas, often alone and in crisis.

In November 2022, the death of John Joseph Gill in England put the focus on elderly Irish people who have been living overseas for many years and who have lost contact with their families.

In Mr Gill’s case, the 86-year-old died in a nursing home in ­Birmingham, having spent much of the previous 14 years in a different nursing home facility in the city.

Birmingham City Council issued an appeal to find his next of kin, resulting in the identification of family including a niece who lived elsewhere in the city and who later attended his funeral, and a surviving brother in Canada.

Padraic Grennan, founder and CEO of Erin’s Call, played a key role in tracking down Mr Gill’s family and attended his funeral. He said the new organisation, which will offer services on a pro bono basis, would try to reconnect people like Mr Gill with their next of kin before it was too late.

“I don’t think it’s ever been done before,” he said of the initiative. “It is not general genealogy – it is to help people who are in dire need.

“A lot of the Irish diaspora who went away fell on hard times and they are embarrassed by it. They don’t want to reach out or burden people.

“The plan is to tap into the Irish organisations around the world. We are looking at opening an ­office in New York.

“It’s just to make people aware that you might not need this ­service but if the time comes we can step in and help.”

Erin’s Call hopes to receive ­requests for help from both members of the diaspora and from families here who have lost touch with relatives overseas.

Karen McHugh, CEO of Safe Home Ireland, said Erin’s Call could provide vital assistance, and noted that her organisation had been in talks with local authorities here to secure social housing for returning Irish people who fit the criteria.

Safe Home Ireland helps repatriate Irish people, often at times of crisis, and has an outreach support element for those who have returned here. But Ms McHugh said that in recent years people seeking help were not just from major UK cities, but from countries such as Sri Lanka, Cyprus and South Africa.

“It’s the migrant’s dream,” she said of the desire to return home. “Often the first or second sentence is ‘I want to die at home’.”

Safe Home has directly accommodated 2,281 people since it was founded in 2000, mostly through gaining access for people to local authority housing lists.

Among the criteria for inclusion is the person must be over 57, live independently and not have the means to buy or rent long term. She said many returnees were suffering from loneliness and desperation, adding: “We would see more layers of complexity than before.”