BBC News
By John Murphy
image captionLondon s Spitalfields, where Irish labourers were accused of under-cutting English men
Ever since the word Brexit was first coined in 2012, issues of migration, integration and independence have dominated public debate across the UK and Ireland.
Now we have reached the centenary year of the partition of Ireland, BBC journalist Fergal Keane has looked back at the profound influence, over many centuries, of the Irish in Britain in a new BBC Radio 4 podcast.
How the Irish Shaped Britain tells a story of contradictory narratives existing in parallel.
In Scotland, historian Professor Tom Devine explains that the digging and construction by Irish navvies and their successors through the 19th and 20th centuries helped to shape the Scotland we know today.