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*Migration Histories > Irish > Settling
* A Two-Way Process ? 
 
We are sick of the blatant howl with which shallow, half-educated English scribblers keep up about the wonderful attributes of the 'Anglo-Saxon'. Everything great and noble in the world is attributed to this imaginary race - every evil in the world to the inferiority of all other peoples who do not come within the magic circle. The howl is all the more disgusting, because no such thing as the Anglo-Saxon ever existed. At this very hour, the preponderance of blood and race in London itself, is, beyond all question, Celtic.
The Irish Liberator 14/11/1863 Source : British Library

Some Irish commentators, such as the journalist Hugh Heinrich, writing in The Nation in July 1872, condemned the "slow, inanimate, spiritless Saxon" whose beard "in common with all inferior races, is scant and weak". Heinrich argued that Irish migrants should resist the morally and spiritually corrupting influences of assimilation to English life and customs. The Irish Exile in May 1921 proclaimed that "the fact that most of the Irish people speak better English than most of the English people does not prove community of mind, but difference in intelligence".

Kevin O'Connor's The Irish in Britain suggests that prejudice abated when it found another target - "the sharpening focus upon the increasing coloured immigrants distracted attention away from the Irish as an alien presence. With cyclic inevitability, coloured immigrants became the object of the same hostile platitudes of 'separateness' i.e. large families, eating habits, noisy parties, that the Irish had been subject to in previous generations".

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Creators: Aidan Lawes

 
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