Why Henry Kelly was popular

For centuries the Irish in this country had been subject to mockery, derision and discrimination – even though there is little evidence that there were signs outside hostels bearing the specific combination of words ‘No blacks, No Irish, No dogs’. And even though levels of historical and contemporary anti-Irishness have in recent history been overplayed by the left, the Irish in Britain were a self-conscious lot. As Tim Pat Coogan wrote in his 2002 book Wherever Green Is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora, many Irish in Britain did experience outright hostility after the Birmingham bombing of 1974. But that was, for the most part, an exceptional experience – the year in which the Troubles reached their nadir.

When I was living in Manchester in 1996, a Belfast housemate was met with the casual greeting ‘hello bomber’ the day after the explosion went off in that city. That typified an English attitude that could certainly be ignorant, thoughtless and callous, but not necessarily one grounded in hatred or ‘racism’.