Published:
April 28, 2021 at 8:24 am
“What is there more marvellous,” an eighth-century Gaelic poem asks, “than the incomparable great story?” The great story of the Irish in Britain is frequently told as a triumph over racism and exclusion – from the era of signs declaring “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” to 21st-century success in business, the arts and entertainment.
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The Irish built the roads, canals and housing estates. They cleared away the debris of Luftwaffe bombing raids. In the words of the ballad ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’, they “sweated blood and they washed down mud with pints and quarts of beer”. It is a story of hardship and forbearance whose privations are hard to imagine for the modern Irish in Britain.