Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were once understood as one of the main victims of British colonial exploitation and its corresponding forms of racial discrimination. However, amidst calls to increase awareness of the manifestations of colonialism and its effects, the Irish story is one seldom represented.
Ignorance of the Irish experience of prejudice is exemplified by the mainstream reaction to the assertion made by Joe, the male protagonist in the 2002 film Bend it Like Beckham, that he understands Jess’ experience of verbal harassment because he’s Irish. There is a bifurcation of responses to this by Gen-Z viewers. On the one hand, some say he is equating anti-brown racism to anti-Irish prejudice, thereby trivializing the reality of being a person of colour in Britain. On the other hand, the conception of this comment as incongruous speaks to the insensibility of Gen Zers to the Irish experience of racism, and the historical background it is informed by.
There is little literature on Irish migration by sociologists principally because they tend to focus on race and visible differences. Irish migrants are not seen as “proper” migrants because of their ostensible whiteness, meaning they do not fit into the sociology of “race relations”, as defined by official discourses (Hickman & Ryan, 2020). Furthermore, cultural differences have been denied due to the Irish being a ‘British Isles’ population group (Keeffe, n.d.).
Nonetheless, an analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes shows that the Irish Catholic constituted the significant outgroup in the construction of the British national identity (Hickman & Walter, 1995). The Irish Catholic was othered because its status comprised the discourse of the colonial subject. Furthermore, Irish migration in the 19th century occurred at a critical moment for the successful securing of national identity, culture, and class alliance in Britain (Hickman & Walter, 1995). According to Benedict Anderson, the notable Irish political scientist, national unity is contingent upon, and defined by, an inherently limited “imagined community”: bound by a shared history, language, ethnicity, and religion. The imagined community of the British was defined by Protestantism, hence the discourse around the Irish Catholic Other was heavily influenced by perceptions of Roman Catholics- the salient Other in English nationalism since the sixteenth century. Hence, anti-Irish prejudice and anti-Catholicism contributed to a “complex categorizing of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain” (Hickman, 1995). Likewise, racial hibernophobia - theories postulating the racial distinctness of Irish people from their Anglo-Saxon neighbours - was important in the re-definition of British national identity during the economically and politically fraught inter-war years (Douglas, 2002).
In today’s Critical Theory paradigm of activism, the Irish hold white privilege, which results in anti-Irish bigotry often being regarded as an aberration (Patterson, 2020). However, whiteness is inherently a social fabrication, subject to changes in categorisation and internal hierarchies. Indeed, in his seminal book, How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev posits the acceptance of the Irish into the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant establishment as evidence of whiteness as a social construct with mutable boundaries (Kang, 2019). Hence, some proffer that “Irish immigrants experienced no white-skinned privilege” in the 19th century (Cherry, 2020). Despite the contestation around the demarcation of ‘whiteness’, there is evidence of anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th, and 20th centuries, with some maintaining “the unsettling pattern of discrimination and abuse” persists (O'Brien, 2021).
Referred to as the Blacks of Europe in the United States, the Irish were conspicuously exploited. The potato famine of 1845 incited an exodus of millions of surviving Irish. Because of the “complex set of social conditions created by British landowners” (Nittle, 2021), whereby they were reluctant to diverge from laissez-faire capitalism and provide aid, many ended up in the United States. However, a change of circumstance did not assuage their plight. Stereotypes of the Irish as lazy, stupid, and violent proliferated. And jarringly, Southern plantations consigned Irish labourers to their most arduous jobs, rather than risk the lives of enslaved Black people (Cherry, 2020).
In the aftermath of the Second World War, labour shortages in Britain gave rise to mass migration, facilitated by labour recruitment schemes. However, this meant popular representations of the Irish migrant spread, with ‘Paddy’ the labourer often used derogatorily to describe Irish men. He was presented as a rough, roguish figure, congruent with generalisations of the Irish as heavy, unskilled labourers, often within the construction industry.
To conclude, anti-Irish racism is rooted in colonial racism, Anglo-Irish relations and the construction of the Irish Catholic as ‘Other’. The race relations paradigm of sociology has framed anti-Irish discrimination with the erroneous myth of British homogeneity, implicitly assuming assimilation. Conversely, anti-Irish stereotypes persist both in British and American society, the former having been triggered by anti-IRA fears over the last thirty years. This means there is still a chronic tension between real integration and the assertion of an easeful Irish identity in Britain.
By Karel O
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