Mr. David Barlow:

I thank the Chairman and committee members for inviting us. It was a pleasure to go the extra mile to be with them. I will run through a brief history of the organisation and then concentrate on outlining the services we offer, both welfare and cultural services, how we link with people today, how this is relevant to their needs and what we are doing to promote Ireland in London.

The London Irish Centre is the oldest and largest Irish charity in Britain. It was founded by the church in 1954 and we are currently celebrating our 60th anniversary. It was founded primarily to provide accommodation, social care, employment and, importantly, ensure Irish emigrants arriving in Britain maintained their faith. That was important to the Catholic Church which had founded the centre. My mother at the tender age of 16 years left what was a poor County Clare in 1951 and arrived in Euston Station on her own three years before the centre was established. It means a lot to me as the chief executive to support the people with whom she travelled and in the years that followed. We still ensure we provide a safe place and a safe start for those making what is probably a much easier journey now.

Since the early days, we have been at the heart of the Irish community in the heart of London. Only yesterday, I looked at an RTE archives film from 1968. RTE came and filmed during the mid-years of the centre and showed people celebrating a céilí and attending mass there. It hammers home the importance of the work we currently do with the older generation who were in that archive film. That is important to us today. The centre has been in place for the past 60 years through the good times for the Irish community but also through some bad times. Originally people came over in a recession; another cohort came in the 1980s and, more recently, many younger people have come to London looking for work. They do not necessarily want to travel to London or leave their homeland. We were also there for people through the Troubles. There was a time - it is documented in all of our records - when the centre was raided almost on a nightly basis by the police service in England to check that everything was above board.

Nowadays we are no longer a ghetto of Irishness. The last thing we want to be is such a ghetto in one of the most diverse cities in the world; therefore, we are outward looking and have integrated. Only 24 hours ago, Mr. Dunne and I attended an event in the parliament at Westminster with the Taoiseach, the UK Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Ed Miliband, and a range of political representatives from the North and across the United Kingdom hosted by a charity founded to look at positive relations between the two states and cross-Border co-operation. Our work no longer necessarily is done in a ghetto. We are now in a different environment. We proudly wave the tricolour from our building and are very much part of the scene in London. Ours remains one of the largest independent welfare organisations in the city. Last year we supported 14,000 people, more than 78% of whom were Irish, most of whom were first generation. We provided varying degrees of support and classed more than 5,000 of them as vulnerable. They are homeless or have severe addictions and mental health problems. We work with families in poverty and those who perhaps are about to lose their homes because of changes to the UK welfare benefit system. Our work is increasing. We have seen more people come in in the past two or three years.

We are doing this alongside having tighter and tighter financial funding restraints.

We value and celebrate our history, but we are certainly not complacent about our services. In 2012 we launched the biggest piece of research ever carried out of the Irish community in London. A total of 855 people - first and second generation - were interviewed about their needs as Irish people and their expectations of Irish services in London. That publication was launched at the UK Parliament's buildings at Westminster and has been referenced in the Dáil and the Westminster Parliament. The reason we produced it was to make sure our services were meeting the needs of people today, not just perceived needs. There are over 130 Irish organisations in Britain, many of which have been using it also to make sure they are tailoring their services to meet the needs of the Irish population in Britain.

There are many perceptions about whom Irish charitable organisations are helping in Britain and much of our innovation is about making sure our services are meeting needs. Only 32% of our clients are over 50 years of age and it is very important to provide services for them. They are the very people I mentioned who came over in the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom are now becoming frail and elderly. We provide befriending and support services for them, including luncheon clubs, bingo clubs, line dancing and so on. However, the biggest group we work with are aged between 26 and 49 years and represent 63% of our clients. There is a growing number of people in their twenties and early thirties coming to London in the past few years.

The other perception which is false is that all younger Irish people coming to Britain are prepared, have decent jobs, are well educated and can settle in easily. That may be the case for many of them, but we are finding that many younger people are coming over without planning their journey and that they are running into difficulties. Jobs or housing that might have been promised to them do not materialise and they quickly find themselves unemployed, homeless and in poverty. We are there to support them also.

I am second generation Irish, as I was born and brought up in the south east of England, and when I moved to live in south-east London as a young person in my early 20s, I had a very large Irish family connection in west London, but I might as well as have been living in Sydney because the enormity of London and the distances involved made it a very lonely place until I could get to see people at weekends. One of the things we are now doing is making sure we are providing services for the many younger people who are coming over who want to celebrate their Irishness, be involved in the organisation and do something with which they can identify as being part of their roots back in Ireland.

I would like to provide one example of a client who I personally helped recently. When we were short of staff a couple of months ago - the staff were very stretched at the time - a young guy came to us. We offer shower facilities and clothing for people who are homeless. The young guy was in his mid-20s and had been in London for just over six months, having left the west of Ireland owing to family issues and relationship problems. He had a job and planned his journey to London, but one evening a couple of weeks after he had arrived he was mugged and it caused him to lose his job, as he was no longer able to work in labouring. He had nasty injuries and was hospitalised for a time. As a result, he could not pay his rent and within a few months was knocking on our door to get clothes from our clothing store and food vouchers. He was sleeping rough down the road in north London. After he had had a shower, I discovered that what he really wanted to do was talk about his situation. We chatted for about half an hour and he was desperate to go home, but he felt he could not return to his previous environment owing to relationship problems. He had one distant relative, but he did not have the means to travel back to Ireland because he was that poor and destitute. We were able to contact his relative and make sure she was happy to put him up and we repatriated him the next morning. We checked it out in order that we knew he was safe, secure, warm and had a roof over his head. This is one of many examples of the work we do on our welfare side.

Obviously, we do not just provide welfare services. Our cultural programme is integrated with our welfare programme and is headed up by Mr. Gary Dunne who will answer questions about it. It is the largest such programme in Britain. In 2013 over 23,000 individuals took part in our arts and cultural events. Our events are extremely diverse, ranging from large-scale festivals such as the Return to Camden Town Festival, the biggest traditional Irish music festival in Britain, to the more contemporary comedy festival which showcases top Irish comedians from Britain and the island of Ireland. It is now in its second year. We have more niche events such as the London Irish Book Club which consists of a small group who meet to look at books. This is very relevant to our trip as later today we will be talking about our library. We are absolutely delighted and very thankful for the support of the committee in helping us to boost it and I am even more delighted to see the books in the flesh, so to speak.

To mark our 60th anniversary, we have a major concert series which is being part-funded by Culture Ireland. We have nine top-of-the-range acts, alongside our normal culture programme, and are very grateful to Culture Ireland for supporting it. In addition to our mainstream cultural programme, we do an awful lot of partnership work which is very much about bringing Irish art to Britain. I have spoken a lot about welfare issues and what we do in-house, but we are not a ghetto; we are very much about showcasing Irish art in Britain. Mr. Dunne and others in the London Irish Centre have been instrumental in working with the British Museum, the South Bank Arts Centre and the University of London, Goldsmith's College. We were commissioned last year and again this year by the Irish Embassy to deliver the Irish Showcase, the leading Irish art showcase in Britain. One of the biggest things in which we are involved is working with the programmers for the concert at the Royal Albert Hall for the President next month. We are very honoured that the London Irish Centre is working on it also.

We want to be a voice for Ireland and the Irish in London. If one types the words "London Irish" on Google, ours is the first organisation one will probably find.

We want to continue doing this for the next 60 years. We could not do the work we do without the support we get from the Irish Government, particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the immigrant support programme. We value that support. In the current financial year which ends this month 48% of our £1.2 million operating costs comes from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The remaining 52% is made up through general fund-raising, property rental and other endeavours. The funding provided by the Irish Government is crucial to the work to which I referred in the area of the arts and welfare. We thank the Irish people, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Government, for this support. We assure the Irish people that we will endeavour to continue to provide services to meet the needs of their elderly relatives in London for the next 60 years. I also assure them that we are also looking after their sons, daughters and siblings who find themselves in London, be it by way of assisting them in finding somewhere they can celebrate being Irish or, if they need it, giving them a helping hand along the way.

I thank the committee for inviting us. It is a great privilege to be here.