IT MIGHT just be the false memory of childhood, but have no recollection of Irish people depending for their identity on the querulous sense of today's victimhood. Perhaps people's confidence all those years ago was helped by the iron certainties of the Catholic Church. Self-pity was certainly not a characteristic among the Irish of Leicester, where my family had emigrated.
We were confident and apologised to nobody. We changed English cities by building churches and schools on hills, and were proud of them. Each May Leicester's Catholics, who were overwhelmingly Irish, paraded through the narrow streets around St Peter's Church to honour the Virgin Mary. The local residents, low-church English - Baptist or Congregationalist - gazed in awe at this procession of girls in white dresses and boys in their neatly pressed shirts and shorts, parading our religion down their thoroughfares (although I dreaded being seen by my sturdy, scabby-kneed tooth all-playing Protestant friends yelling the Rosary in the company of mere girls).
But there was no racial animosity towards the Irish. None, ever.
Strong Dublin accent
My father was a GP who retained a strong Dublin accent, and nobody said a word against him. Many of the boys I went to school with were sons of working-class Irish families. Murphys, O'Flynns, Morans, Fitzpatricks, McKennas. Although the English were lost in awe at the O'Flynn fecundity - a child every 10 months despite my father's earnest advice to Mr O'Flynn to take it easy: maybe it was Mrs O'Flynn whose appetites needed subduing - their observations were untouched by ethnic superiority.
Who was the most popular singer in Britain then? Ruby Murray from Belfast. Who was the most popular television personality? Eamon Andrews from Dublin. Who was the leading businessman? Sir Patrick Hennessy of Ford, from Cork. Who were the rising stars of the trade union movement? Mick McGahey and Joe Gormley sons of the Irish diaspora. Who was the star of the London stage? Brendan Behan. Who were the heart-throbs of the British film- world? Stephen Boyd from Belfast and Kieron Moore from the Connemara Gaeltacht.
There was, of course, pre judice in Britain: class prejudice and religious prejudice. If you were a poor Irish Catholic, it was your poverty and your religion which might attract disdain. And there might well have been signs somewhere saying No Irish Need Apply. I never saw any, and I heard of them only in Ireland; if there were any, they were rare to the point of non existence.
Murdering people
Of course that was before the IRA got it into their brains that the way to get a united Ireland was by murdering people - such as, for example, elected politicians. The IRA has twice tried to wipe out the British Cabinet, and tried to kill three prime ministers - Heath, Thatcher and Major. It has bombed the Tower of London in the middle of the tourist season, slaughtering visitors there. It has blown up blameless bandsmen playing in the middle of a park, and blasted the decorative horses and horsemen of the Blues and Royals into eternity.
Its idiot-terrorist campaign even targeted London restaurants on the grounds that anyone in such places was upper-class and therefore oppressing the Irish and deserving of death. It targeted pubs in Birmingham for no reason whatever, killing nearly two dozen people. It blew apart a bus full of soldiers, and wiped out an entire family: father, mother and child. Public figures who stood four square in denunciation of what it was doing - Ross McWhirter, Ian Gow were m urd ered in their homes. It butchered children in Warrington, levelled Manchester in the middle of a football festival, and destroyed Canary Wharf.
And now we read that the Commission for Racial Equality in Britain has discovered bias against the Irish there. Ha. Well they would, wouldn't they? Is it conceivable that an organ isation dedicated to the discovery of racial prejudice is going to declare: We Didn't Find Any? Is it conceivable that something like CORE was going to declare it has one less reason to exist?
The CORE chairman, Sir Herman Ouseley, maintains that there is evidence of inequality, discrimination and prejudice against the Irish. Is it surprising, considering the barbarity of the IRA campaign in Britain? What is actually surprising is the low lev el of anti-Irishness in cities which have been the recipients of IRA atrocities, and where the Irish, Riverdance and all, are extraordinarily popular.
Poor Paddy cliche
Attend carefully. Were English terrorists levelling Dublin and Galway and assassinating our elected politicians, and there were large numbers of ethnic English living here, how would they be treated? If English terrorists massacred an Irish Army band, and English exiles in Dublin sold newspapers in their pubs which exulted in such an atrocity, what would our reaction be? If England was a safe haven for known English terrorists whom its courts refused to extradite, how comfortable would English exiles here be made to feel?
In other words, enough of this dreary old cliche about Poor Paddy, either from the Right-On School of Semi-Provo Irish Victimhood, or from the Race-Relations Industry in Britain. The British are perhaps the most tolerant people in Europe. That might not be very tolerant, it is true; but we must settle for what we can get. And whatever Sir Herman Ouseley is complaining about would vanish overnight if the militarist fools of the IRA terminated their wicked war. But the IRA loves anti-Irishness, as do their fellow travellers; for it confers that delicious condition, victimhood, of which we have had quite enough, thank you.