‘The Irish are not – whether they like it or not – a different race from the ordinary inhabitants of Great Britain,’ a government report had stated in the 1950s, and many Irish in Britain bitterly resented being fingered as ‘foreigners’ during the 1962 debates. When in 1955 newspapers reported that the Irish were sharing poor accommodation with non-white migrants, the Irish Embassy, worried about the reaction back home, produced a study refuting the claims. According to Delaney, the idea that the Irish were a special immigrant group wasn’t pushed during the 1962 debates: the pretence was sustained that Ireland and Britain were merely two nation-states reaching agreement on how best to manage the relationship between their peoples. The Labour Party seems to have used the Irish question to make a wider political point without really wanting to change the immigration status of the Irish, not least because the bulk of Irish Catholic immigrants tended to vote Labour, read the Daily Mirror and nurse a wholly justified historic grievance against the Conservative Party.
Oxford | hardback
232 pp. |ISBN:
9780199276677
