Irish-Americans vs. 'Irish-English'

Hibernians in Britain are now a ‘market-dominant minority’

One of the clearest childhood memories I have of watching television will never leave me. I was at a friend’s house one Saturday lunchtime, where I can still visualise the small downstairs TV room with a piano next door. 

We must have been watching Football Focus, which along with Saint and Greavsie dominated Saturday lunchtimes. The news came on, and what we saw was footage of a mob beating to death two British corporals who had accidentally stumbled into an IRA funeral in Belfast.

The video was incredibly graphic, something I’m not sure would be shown today, and I remember feeling so disturbed and upset. Maybe I was crying. I was only 10, and just couldn’t understand how people could do that to fellow human beings.

There was a back story to this episode — the funeral in question was being held for one of three Catholics shot three days earlier at yet another funeral, in Milltown Cemetery, where a lone Loyalist gunman called Michael Stone had opened fire on mourners. Two of his victims had been civilians; one an IRA member.

Those Milltown funerals were for IRA members killed by the British in Gibraltar, and so the crowd at first thought it was a repeat attack. The IRA, this time heavily in attendance, then murdered the two corporals. It was a grim stage of the Troubles.

As a family we had gone on a mildly terrifying holiday to Northern Ireland that year; I remember the Antrim coast being especially beautiful, and Giant’s Causeway quite special, but we felt tense much of the time, especially in Belfast. It was a huge relief to cross the border, something which didn’t seem to be marked (in my memory) except for the fact that the roads immediately deteriorated in quality. 

As we crossed that controversial and resented frontier the tired old family Talbot began to make even louder distressed sounds as it came upon the crumbing tarmac of the 26 counties, and we were all happy to be out of that tense province with its homicidal maniacs who would shoot you for your pronunciation of certain words.

The North felt very alien compared to where my family lived in Dublin, and where we’d spend a great deal of our summer holiday as children, and often Christmas too, taking the Holyhead-Dún Laoghaire ferry in the asthmatic Talbot (which, embarrassed by its lack of prestige, I had told everyone was a Peugeot). 

But at least our car had four doors. I remember once walking back to the family home after Sunday Mass and noting how every single vehicle had two doors, and this was in the Sandymount area, equivalent to perhaps Chiswick or Fulham in London. It struck me how much less glamorous they all were compared to the cars back home.

Again, my memory might be completely wrong, but Ireland seemed incredibly poor. One of my cousin’s friends didn’t have a telephone at home. There were beggars in the streets when we went into town, this when street begging was still rare in London. The upside to this vaguely Angela’s Ashes memory was that we walked into town completely unsupervised, and spent the day going up and down the DART without any parental concern because Ireland was, famously, fantastically safe. I suspect that Northern Ireland in the 50s was probably the least violent society in history, although others suggest that the Republic in the 60s was even safer.

Of course Northern Ireland was not particularly safe by the time I was growing up. Although the province was less violent than many American cities even at the height of the madness, 3,500 people lost their lives, most in the Six Counties but many in England, too.

Near where my mum now lives, in Deal in Kent, is a memorial to the 11 young men murdered by an IRA bomb in September 1989. They were musicians of the Royal Marines Band Service, and for that some men felt they had the right to kill them; they were among the countless numbers whose lives were cruelly cut short, leaving grieving families.

The IRA were matched in their cruelty, if not their intelligence or capacity, by Loyalist terrorists, but the Provos were the main instigators of the Troubles, even if the younger generation have largely forgotten; indeed as Alex Massie wrote recently, that reliably wrong cohort believe the British Army to be responsible for the bulk of the killings.

The people behind the corporal murders were released as part of the Good Friday Agreement, as were Michael Stone and other Loyalist killers. That’s the price of peace and, hard as it is to take, it is surely a price worth paying. 

Yet many people in Britain still find the sight of Gerry Adams gurning away with mainstream politicians hard to stomach, and there was a notable reaction here to the Sinn Féin man posing alongside President Joe Biden for a selfie back in April. (Why a selfie? As one or two wits pointed out, surely Adams knows how to use a timer, reminiscent of this, the best tweet of all time.)

Still, many stoical and admirable people, directly affected by the immense tragedy of 1969-94, buried the hatchet and conceded that the Good Friday Agreement meant accepting Adams as a figure that respectable public figures have their pictures taken with.

Biden’s successful tour was good for Ireland, and for his political prospects, even if the importance of wearing the Green is not as great as it once was. But his sense of connection to Ireland, and his occasional anti-British quips, do not go unnoticed on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Yet there is another aspect to this complex relationship, which is the different worldviews of the Irish-American and ‘Irish-English’ population. Irish-Americans like Biden’s ancestors, from Co. Mayo, brought anti-Britishness with them as a political tradition, hugely influenced by the Famine, and became very influential in the Democratic Party. Irish-Americans came to retain a strong identification with the old country, even multiple generations later. There is also an argument that Irishness is attractive to some Americans because it has that rare sense of white victimhood. 

The same is not really true over here: as many as one in ten people in Great Britain have an Irish grandparent, which means that 6 million people on this island have more of an Irish connection than Joe Biden. The current England football team is very Irish by descent.

But the Irish-English worldview tends to be different. Partly this may have been a selection effect to start with, people moving to England probably being less hostile to that country (although I’ve met a few people brought up here with strong republican views). 

I say Irish-English, not Irish-British, because the situation further north is slightly different. Sectarian identity has lasted in the west of Scotland, and in Liverpool Irish migration was large enough to change the accent and identity of the city, but elsewhere in England significant Irish populations in Birmingham, London, Manchester and the north-east did not lead to a huge cultural change. 

The Irish in London were heavily concentrated in an arc spreading out from Euston and Paddington stations, the historical arrival points from Holyhead and Fishguard: I grew up in Notting Hill and my Catholic secondary school was overwhelmingly Irish by descent, drawing in the diaspora from Kilburn, Maida Vale, Harlesden, Shepherd’s Bush, Acton and Willesden and up to Harrow. Camden Town was also heavily Irish.

But these communities have come to assimilate, just as with the 19th century Irish communities concentrated in the slums of St Giles’s and Holborn; there were also spots like the Jennings’ Building on High Street Kensington, where 1,000 dirt poor residents lived in the ‘Irish Rookery’ with no running water.

Mine was the last generation of that Irish diaspora. While at school the Tiger Economy was already emerging, a product of a highly educated workforce, a natural flair for the sort of schmoozing that is so important to business in the 21^st century, an absence of post-industrial problems, and the English language (‘now wouldn’t we be nicely fucked if they had succeeded’, the Dublin novelist Roddy Doyle is supposed to have once said when discussion of the Gaelic revival movement came up). 

Migration to Britain is a very different process now, with the Irish in Britain now earning over 40% more than the natives. The Irish in Britain might even be called a ‘market-dominant minority’, an idea that once would have provoked mocking laughter; indeed it is such a recent phenomenon that infant mortality rates, a useful proxy for poverty, among English people of Irish descent only converged in the 1990s.

Irish migrants are highly skilled and well-paid because Ireland is fantastically rich, and now looks at Britain with a certain amount of pity, although mixed with some anger that Brexit will also drag them down. It’s the behaviour of a domineering former abusive partner who’s now having some terrible midlife crisis — and to further confuse things, a lot of Irish-English people actually voted to Leave.

Although many in Britain expressed resentment over Biden’s visit to Ireland, the underlying paradox is that the American was being served a traditional vision of Ireland which Irish opinion-formers themselves dislike, one deeply tied up with the Catholic tradition. 

Commenting on a (London) Times cartoon which used leprechaun imagery, The Irish Times’s Justine McCarthy wrote: ‘Sometimes, the old enemy can be a country’s best friend, if inadvertently. Loath though any united Irelander bred in the broth of anglophobia may be to admit this, but them-next-door were only stating the obvious when they highlighted US president Joe Biden’s paddywhackery homecoming to the old sod.’

Yet the problem for Ireland’s cultural establishment is that their modern vision of Ireland seems pretty similar to the ‘modern’ vision of Britain dreamed up in the Blair years — which is essentially an ideal imagined by America’s coastal elites. So keen are they to imitate the imperial centre that Ireland has even begun importing racial guilt, a bizarre affectation for a country which literally speaks the language of a colonising power. Still, if we view such ideas as luxury beliefs, the pretensions of a national elite keen to be taken seriously on the global stage, then their spread is as much testimony to Ireland’s success as the endless line of luxury cars you see stuck in Dublin’s traffic jams.