Differences, Boundaries, Coummunity:

The Irish in Britain

Dr. Mary J. Hickman


Press to get a copy in hqx format for Word 4.0. Dont't forget to set the page numbers in your software before printing.


The issue of community is an important one for a minority population in Britain because of its relationship to issues of the nation, identity, ethnicity, migration and racism. However, to date, discussions about the Irish community either involve assertions that such an entity exists, or counterarguments suggesting that the degree of differentiation and dispersal of the Irish population negates the idea that we form a community. It is, however, important to refute the idea that differentiation necessarily negates community. At the same time, I would agree with the detractors of community that it is necessary to do more than just assert that the phenomenon exists. It is necessary to create a framework for understanding the basis of community and within that context establish what is meant by an Irish community.

Benedict Anderson describes nations as 'imagined communities'.1 All communities, he insists, which are larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact, are imagined. Until recently, the nation represented the largest community that most individuals imagined themselves as belonging to. All communities are distinguished not so much by falsity or genuineness but by the style in which they are imagined. The politics of forming a nation is the process by which the identity of a 'people' or 'community' is forged. The 'people' and its biography are mythical. Most nations, all products of the modern period, are based on imagined histories which posit back a unity, sometimes to antiquity, of its people.

The nationalist myth elevates to a birthright the fantasy of being rooted. For all those who are displaced by migration (frequently forced and structural), or who are refugees, the search for roots becomes inevitable, and often, depending on the context, this can be a poignant and difficult search to accomodate.2 In this sense then, we can say that the notion of the Irish community in Britain is a myth--it is a myth in just the same way that all nations, or ethnicities, as imagined communities, are based on myth and all migrant groups live the contradictions of maintaining or not maintaining that myth in the diaspora. Thus, Irishness is both a world and a set of representations, carried around in the heads of actual people, and can be displayed across a number of texts and visual representations.3

All migrant groups from former colonies or, generally, from the 'South' coming to the 'North' (in the Brandt Report's sense of those terms) have to engage with and resolve problems of difference. They migrate bearing the traces of particular cultures, traditions, languages, systems of belief, histories that have shaped them, and are obliged to come to terms with and make something new of the cultures and economic location they come to inhabit, without simply assimilating.4 When the country they migrate to is the former colonising power, how much more acute and sensitive the situation is. Any comparison of the Irish in Britain with the Irish in the USA and Australia in the 19th century will bear this out. The contrast in terms of control of the Catholic Church and open participation in the political system is striking. It is not that the Irish did not face opposition in those two societies, but the response by the Irish was different.

It has been a main function of national cultures to represent what is in fact the ethnic mix of modern nationality as the primordial unity of 'one people'. This has been achieved by centralised nation-states with their incorporating cultures and national identities, implanted and secured by strong cultural institutions, which tend to subsume all differences and diversity into themselves.5 The Irish first came in very large numbers to Britain during the period which was most critical for the successful securing of a national identity and culture in Britain (and by that means a class alliance): i.e., the 19th century. In that period the Irish were both the most sizeable and most visible minority element in the population. In migrant communities in Britain, 'Irishness' as an essentialist notion has shaped itself against other forms of political and cultural identity, especially Englishness. The consequences have been profound for the subsequent history and experience of the Irish in Britain.

The strategy of the British State and the Catholic Church has been incorporation; for example, through the education system. By incorporation I mean the active attempts by the State to regulate the expression and development of separate and distinctive identities by potentially oppositional groups in order to create a single nation-state. The incorporation of the Irish Catholic working class in Britain was based on strategies of denationalisation, and was not the consequence of an inevitable process of assimilation or integration. In Catholic schools, the priority placed on religious instruction, the effort which went into religious instruction, and the manner in which the religious pervaded all the rituals of school life were all part of a strategy for reinforcing the religious identity of the pupils at the expense of their national identity. There was a corresponding silence in the curriculum content of Catholic schools about Ireland.6

It is not surprising, therefore, that a contemporary account suggests the pressure experienced by the second generation to marginalise Irish identity. Tom Barclay, in his memoirs of a bottlewasher, recounts his childhood in Leicester in the 1850s and 1860s. After describing his mother's recitation of old bardic legends and laments, he continues:

But what had I to do with all that? I was becoming English. I did not hate things Irish, but I began to feel that they must be put away; they were inferior to things English. . . . Outside the house everything was English: my catechism, lessons, prayers, songs, tales, games. . . . Presently I began to feel ashamed of the jeers and mockery and criticism.7

'Becoming English' was not based on an inevitable process of cultural assimilation but on acquiring a perception of the inferiority of Irishness compared with Englishness. The cultural pressures to become English and reject Irishness that Barclay cites primarily emanated from the Catholic Church. His world outside the home was defined by the Church and the school, and the latter contained textbooks which glorified England and were silent about Ireland. In another example, Bart Kennedy describes his Catholic schooling as being "taught a great deal about the glory of God and the glory of England, and very little about the art of reading and writing. . . . It was a great privilege to be born in England, the teacher said".8

A low public profile for the Irish became characteristic in Britain as a result of these incorporatist strategies. One person I interviewed, when asked what the term Irish community meant to him, said, 'hidden people'. This low public profile is the main achievement of the state and institutional response to the Irish presence in 19th century Britain. For example, Catherine Ridgeway, discussing her early years living in England in the late 1920s and early 1930s, commented:

During that period I didn't mix much with Irish people. Mostly English. I think my uncle and aunt put me off. They said, "Don't get involved in Irish clubs or anything like that", because there was still the political background all the time. As the years went on and I was learning more about the political situation, I still didn't get involved, because you always had at the back of your mind that if anything crops up and you are involved, you might be deported or something like this.9

This quotation, and there are many others to support it, demonstrates that the low public profile is not just a product of events in Northern Ireland since 1968. The Irish in Britain have been positioned as a potential political and social threat since the Act of Union in 1801 brought Ireland into the United Kingdom.

It was the expulsion of a specific sector of the Irish peasantry, almost exclusively Catholics, that became represented as the problem of Irish migration in Britain. This occurred despite the fact that for over two hundred years a range of social classes have migrated from Ireland to Britain, including both Protestants and Catholics. This process of construction of the Irish 'minority', however, does not solely rest on the fact that historically the structural location of the majority of Irish Catholic migrants has been as part of the casual, unskilled and semi-skilled working class. As important in understanding the 'place' of the problematised 'Irish' is the discursive effects of Anglo-Irish colonial relations and their articulation with the religious signification of British nationalism.

In that context it is unsurprising that references to the Irish community in Britain in 19th- and 20th-century discourses usually refer to working-class Irish Catholics, part of whose response has been to construct a community life based on the very features that encapsulated the threat they represented: religion, national politics and class organisation. Obviously, at different times and in different contexts these elements of 'community' are articulated together differently.

The incorporation of the 19th-century Irish immigrants was never completely successful because, although the state and its agencies managed to regulate the expression of Irish identity, it was not able to eradicate it from all those of Irish descent. Identity is an arena of contestation, and the result for many was a complex identity with different elements to the fore in different contexts. Both these points are illustrated by Anne Higgins, who was born in Manchester in the 1930s. This is how she described her childhood:

We were under a kind of siege being Irish Catholics in Manchester in the thirties and forties. We lived initially in a very poor inner-city district where there were many other Irish families. The parish school we went to had mainly Irish teachers and pupils, we knew Irish Catholic families in the street, we met Irish people at the church, and we didn't have to associate with English people if we didn't want to. In point of fact, my mother made friends easily and a next-door neighbour who was a staunch English Protestant became her best friend in no time, but we mixed mainly with other Irish people.10

Reflecting on her own identity at the time of being interviewed in the 1980s, she said: "My religion, political beliefs and national identity were all inter-related when I was a child. I've had to rethink my position on all of these over the years but I'm glad I have been able to carry with me, much of what was important to me as a child."11

Anne Higgins speaks for many in this statement. Identity is not fixed, it changes over time and in different circumstances. But the elements she refers to--national identity (Irish), religion (Catholic) and political beliefs (support for the Labour party)--hardly deviate from what clearly emerge as the chief characteristics of the readers of the Irish Post, the biggest-selling newspaper for the Irish in Britain, in its recent survey.12

The proclaimed Irish identity, Catholicism and to a lesser extent support for the Labour party of the mid-20th-century migrants are rooted in the material basis of the 1950s migration and settlement in Britain. The experience of the emigrants of that period can be understood in terms of the co-existence and intersection of their class position (both in Ireland and in Britain) with their ethnicity (as asserted by them, be it in the Counties associations of the 1950s or the welfare or cultural organisations of the 1980s, and as assigned to them by their continuing problematisation as a social and political threat). The imagined community of being Irish in Britain, as so far discussed, is one that has been constituted by the sense of a forced migration and the differences and boundaries which were immanent in the problematisation of Irish immigrants. The making of a sense of community for this generation of migrants at some level has been secured through a common experience of loss.13 This is the concrete reality of a distinct (although not homogeneous) community.

It is important to emphasise another aspect of community or cultural identity, one which recognises that as well as many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute 'what we really are' or 'what we have become'. Cultural identities, far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, are subject to the continuous 'play' of culture and power. Every regime of representation is a regime of power, and the dominant regimes of colonial experience had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as 'Other'. This inner expropriation of cultural identity can cripple and distort if it is not resisted. Cultural identities, therefore, are points of identification which are made within discourses of history and culture, and therefore are not essences but positionings.14

In Britain, the experience of anti-Irish disadvantage and discrimination has exerted its own influence over the development of Irish identity. Thus the particular articulation of religion, class and national identity that historically has constituted the communal identity of being Irish in Britain can be understood as, in part, an aspect of this resistance of colonial regimes of representation. Irish identity was also formed in resistance to a racist British nationalism, for which Irish migrants were a specific Other. In other words, individuals and collectivities that are prey to racism (its 'objects') find themselves constrained to see themselves as a community.15

For example, during the past twenty years stereotypes and problematising discourses about the Irish have led to the toleration of the civil liberties abuses, which amount to a form of 'state racism', sustained by Irish people in Britain through the operation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). In 1974, after the IRA carried out the Birmingham Pub bombings in England, the Prevention of Terrorism Act was rushed through Parliament. It gave the Secretary of State considerable new powers to control the movement of people between Ireland and Great Britain. The Act provided extensive powers to establish a comprehensive system of port controls, and a process of internal exile which gives the Secretary of State the power to remove people who are already living in Great Britain to either Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland.

Although the legislation was extended in 1984 to cover international terrorism, the port powers were devised, and have principally been applied, to control Irish people travelling between Britain and Ireland.16 The Prevention of Terrorism Act is:

. . . a discriminatory piece of law in that it is directed primarily at one section of the travelling public. In effect it means that Irish people in general have a more restrictive set of rights than other travellers. In this sense, the Irish community as a whole is a 'suspect community'.17

The evidence suggests that the use of the powers is targeted at two particular groups: principally, young men living in Ireland and Irish people living in Britain. The introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act created a dual system of criminal justice in Britain. Of the 7,052 who had been detained under the Act by the end of 1991, 6,097, or 86 per cent, have been released without any action being taken against them.18 People are suspects primarily because they are Irish. The usefulness of the PTA has always hinged on the fact that it can suppress political activity, build up information on Irish people and intimidate the whole Irish community.

A nun who was very active in the campaigns to get people like the Guildford Four (four people wrongfully imprisoned for an IRA bombing at Guildford in England) and the Birmingham Six (six people wrongfully imprisoned for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings) released has recorded the following account of the pressures on Irish people, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s:

There were widespread arrests. . . . People picked up under the PTA had no rights whatsoever in those early days. They disappeared. Eventually, we found out that they could be held for seven days. Police denied that they were holding people. Detainees were questioned at all hours, day and night, and solicitors were not allowed in. It was a very anxious time for the families of those detained. . . . It was terrible from 1975 to 1981. That was the worst period; I call it the 'bad time'. Police with dogs, guns and vans swooped on houses in the early hours of the morning, frightening young children, damaging property and making innocent law-abiding citizens the targets of suspicion in their streets and neighbourhoods. If they were any way involved, and when I say 'involved', I mean any way Irish at all, they were raided or taken in.19

The way in which the PTA was implemented fueled anti-Irish racism, with the oft-repeated injunctions of the police after various incidents to 'Keep an eye on Irish neighbours and watch out for Irish accents'. In the campaigns in the late 1980s to obtain the release of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, many Irish people in Britain (and critically some British people) who often had very different views on events in Northern Ireland came together to right these self-evident injustices. In such circumstances, a sense of community is fostered out of particular historical experiences and in response to specific social constructions of the Irish in Britain.

Cultural identity, however, also represents hybridity. In this emphasis the diaspora experience necessarily recognises heterogeneity and diversity, because identity lives with and through difference. Compared with the late 1970s and 1980s, in the 1990s there is a greater representation of the Irish 'community' as diverse, if we can take the changes in reportage in the Irish Post (the bestselling newspaper for the Irish in Britain) as one gauge of this. In the early 1980s, references to Irish women's groups were at best nervous; nowadays they are routine. The area of sensitivity today, in many Irish arenas, including the Irish Post, is much more likely to be acknowledgment of the existence and campaigns of Irish gay and lesbian groups.

These examples, though, still refer to the 1940s&endash;60s rural emigrants from the Republic of Ireland and their children. They are not, however, the only elements in the Irish population in Britain (nor were they ever the only element), although they still remain the largest grouping. The other major constituent elements are those who have migrated from the Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, and the large flow of migrants from the Republic in the past ten years. Compared with the 19th century, the experience of any Protestant from Northern Ireland coming to Britain, but especially to England, is very different. Anyone with a northern accent is viewed as Irish. There is hardly any research published about them as a group, although some studies are now underway. But the numbers from Northern Ireland have increased substantially in the last twenty years, and they form a significant element in what constitutes being Irish in Britain today.

However, the largest augmentation of the Irish population in Britain has come from the Republic of Ireland since the early 1980s. Much has been made of the fact that these migrants are very different from the 1940s&endash;60s generation who left Ireland. The recent migrants have higher levels of educational qualifications and in the main are more likely to come from urban backgrounds. Some of these differences have been exaggerated, but nevertheless, this migration is significantly different from the previous two main phases in the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.

For example, it is assumed that attitudes of the new migrants to the Catholic Church are different, and it is expected that this is bound to have an impact on what constitutes 'community' for the Irish in Britain. There have been a number of studies of these new migrants in terms of employment, housing, etc., but only a small number which examine attitudes and perspectives, especially about religion and national identity. One study focused on recent migrants of largely working-class origin from the Republic, in their twenties and thirties who left Ireland without a Leaving Certificate. Contradictory sentiments about Catholicism emerge from their responses. Many of the new migrants from the Republic make a direct link between Catholicism and unhappiness, and bemoan the impact they perceive Catholicism to have on their own lives and on Irish society as a whole. But for many it would appear that although they have jettisoned their adherence to Catholic beliefs, they recognise that Catholicism has had a part in shaping their Irish identity. These responses prompt the speculation that the respondents have a strong sense of Irish identity as apart from Catholicism, but that Catholicism touches their lives because of its place in Irish society and politics, and the role it has played historically in the Irish community of which they are now a part.20

Another study indicates that young Irish middle-class migrants comment, whether from the North or the South, that they find Britain 'shockingly secular'. A sense of spirituality, although not necessarily attachment to organised religion, emerges as an important marker that differentiates the Irish from the English. None of these Irish migrants described themselves as an agnostic or an atheist.21 This sample was markedly more middle-class than the other, and although both samples are small, they suggest that further research in this area would be fruitful. Research needs to be carried out on the repercussions for the Irish community in Britain of the changing role of religion as a part of Irish national and cultural identities, against a backdrop of the secularisation of Irish society and the changes in Anglo-Irish relations heralded by the current peace process.

 

Conclusion

I set out at the beginning to indicate a framework for understanding the basis of community and within that context establish what is meant by an Irish community. Broadly, I have situated the discussion within the context of the inevitable problematic that immigrant groups encounter of coming to terms with and making something new of the cultures and economic location they come to inhabit, without simply assimilating. Until the late 1960s, the agenda in Britain was assimilation/incorporation. The strong incorporatist tendencies of British national culture made an indelible mark on the experience of Irish migrants to Britain, and still shape the positioning of the Irish within that national culture.

The agenda, however, is now about plurality; cultural diversity is the hallmark of post-modernity, and it is now more apparent that symbols that represent the differences and boundaries that constitute the Irish community in Britain do not necessarily have the same meaning for all Irish people or those of Irish descent. This differentiation is a strength rather than a weakness. The greatest danger surely arises from forms of national and cultural identity that attempt to secure their identity by adopting closed versions of culture and community.

The point is that 'community' is highly symbolised, with the consequence that members of the community can invest it with their often very different selves. Its character is sufficiently malleable that it can accommodate all its members' selves. The imagined community which divides the world between 'us' and 'them' is maintained by a whole system of symbolic 'border guards'. These border guards are used as shared cultural resources with shared collective positioning vis-à-vis other collectivities. They can provide the collectivity members with 'imagined communities', but also with 'communicative communities'. Membership in a people consists in the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than with other outsiders.22 So although people will have different imaginings of the 'community' in their heads, some symbols or practices will unite larger groups of them, effectively forming alliances on an ethnic basis. Question marks remain over Irish identity in Britain in this respect, but there is no doubt it is a more inclusive notion of community than in the past. The essentialised Irish community which was formed in resistance to anti-Irish racism and in opposition to constructions of English/British identity entailed 'silences' which an emphasis on hybridity allows now to be 'voiced'.

Notes:

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 56.

2 Stephan Feuchtwang, "Where You Belong," in Where You Belong, ed. A. Cambridge and S. Feuchtwang (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1992).

3 Jonathan Harris, "Passages: Transportations," in Wave/Another Country: Irish Exile and Dispossession, ed. C. O'Leary (Huddersfield: Huddersfield Art Gallery, 1991).

4 Stuart Hall, "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities," in Culture, Globalisation and World System, ed. A. D. King (London: Macmillan, 1991).

5 Stuart Hall, "Our Mongrel Selves," New Statesman and Society, 19 June, 1992.

6 Mary J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1995).

7 Lynn Hollen-Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Immigrants in Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 190.

8 Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England 1880-1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993).

9 Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam, and Joanne O'Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain (London: Virago, 1988), p. 50.

10 Ibid., p. 146.

11 Ibid., p. 155.

12 "Survey of the Readership," published weekly between 5th December 1992 and 16th January 1993, Irish Post, London.

13 Fiona Barber, "No Great and Recognisable Events: The Representation of Emigration, Gender and Class," in Wave/Another Country.

14 Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).

15 Etienne Balibar, "Is There a Neo-racism?," in Race, Nation, Class, ed. E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991).

16 Paddy Hillyard, Suspect Community: People's Experience of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1993).

17 Ibid., p. 13.

18 Ibid.

19 Lennon, Across the Water, p. 196.

20 Sinead McGlacken, unpublished research dissertation for B.A. Honors Degree, Irish Studies Centre, University of North London, 1992.

21 Mary Kells, "Ethnic Identity Amongst Young Irish Middle Class Migrants in London," in Irish Studies Centre Occasional Papers Series, No. 7 (London: University of North London Press, 1995).

22 Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialised Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1992).

 


Mary J. Hickman can be reached at: support@zonezero.com