What Anti-Irish Prejudice Teaches Us About Islamophobic Hysteria

In the aftermath of the recent spate of terrorist attacks in England, the usual ghouls shambled into the human realm from their fetid nests in the right-wing press. Melanie Phillips labelled the entire "ancient faith" of Islam responsible, Julia Hartley-Brewer blamed the liberal bubble and Nigel Farage huffed so hard on his dog whistle you'd have thought his Labrador was loose at the East India Club.

Keeping Panicky and Freaking Out was very much the order of the day, and it was matched by a rise in violence – the attacks on Westminster Bridge, Manchester and London Bridge all preceded surges in Islamophobic incidents. Following the attack on the Ariana Grande concert at MEN, there was a 500 percent increase in reports of hate crimes. The national conversation feels distinctly knee-jerky, and scape-goats can come easier to some than real reflection.

We've been here before; different players, same headlines. Three days after the Birmingham bombings in 1974, the Guardian ran an editorial with the headline "Those Who Harbour Terrorists", arguing that the police should be allowed to be "less fastidious in its enquiries among those suspected of guilty knowledge". The paper stated confidently that the "murderous tools" of terrorism "are provided by sympathisers here." Not long after, the Sunday Telegraph went with the headline "The Irish in our midst," describing how Irish immigration after the Second World War was bringing with it "an abyss of religious bigotry… an abyss which is still wide and has jagged, cruel edges to it."

Today, the Irish people who'd left the ould sod – and who supposedly posed such a threat to Britain in the 1970s – are now in their seventies. I took myself to "County" Kilburn, London's old-school stronghold of the Irish community – supposedly because, back in the day, it was the farthest you could walk from Euston with a suitcase – to see if I could find some of these peerless menaces to civilisation.

It was a Saturday afternoon at the Kingdom Bar, and the GAA was on. Wexford beat Limerick, if you're curious. After talking to almost every nationality under the sun, I got chatting with Patsy, who'd moved to London from Waterford in the 60s.

"We were initially all ghettoised, like a lot of peoples just arrived," he told me. "You'd get talked down to by the English, all the lazy Paddy jokes and everything, but there was en edge to it after the Troubles came over here in the 70s." British soldiers began to die in Northern Ireland in 1971; by 1975, IRA bombs were regularly detonating in England, producing a slow drip of casualties; by 1998, 115 people were dead and 2,134 were seriously injured on the "mainland" UK, compared to 3,483 dead and countless injured in Ireland.

"If you think people don't know much about Ireland here now, it was worse then," Patsy said. "They just couldn't understand the fact that people from the South – even if we were Catholic and thought a united Ireland was a pretty good idea – had nothing to do with the North, let alone the IRA. As soon as they heard the accent, that was it. If there'd been a bombing or somebody had been shot, you'd hear about little old ladies laying into their neighbours. It was like what you read about during the famine days, all the stereotypes about drinking and being lazy and dirty."

The 1974 Prevention of Terrorism act led to several miscarriages of justice and notoriously invasive border and ferry crossing checks in the 70s and 80s. Everyone I speak to swore they saw "No Coloureds, No Irish" on bedsit ads in newsagents.

Back in Kilburn, Patsy introduced me to Eileen, who moved to London in the 80s from Tyrone, in the North, to work as a nurse. "I arrived not long after they'd blown up Harrods and Hyde Park, and Thatcher was always on the TV ranting and raving," she told me. "At work, every time something happened, people would say things like, 'Oh, your lot have been at it again.' I can see why – it's so easy to generalise, especially out of ignorance, but it couldn't fail to make you feel terrible. I mean, how were we responsible for all that? I can see how the younger lads at home got angrier and angrier. It's hard to understand that emotion unless you've felt it."

Internment was a common thread in sensationalised responses from journalists after London's recent terror attacks. The Telegraph's Allison Pearson called for "thousands" of people to be rounded up, and Katie Hopkins told Fox News "we do need internment camps". Supposedly sensible voices also suggested internment camps were an appropriate measure. Tarique Ghaffur, former assistant commissioner to the Met, wrote in the Mail on Sunday that "the time has come to set up special centres to detain these 3,000 extremists", with reference to the number of potential extremists still considered a threat by MI5.

In Northern Ireland, internment was a disaster when it was introduced in 1971. Danny Morrison, who was Sinn Fein's director of publicity in the 80s, was interned as a republican prisoner in 1972. "Me and a friend were at a dance with our girlfriends when the Army came in, firing rubber bullets, and closed off all the entrances," he told me over the phone from Belfast. "They took us out one at a time and put us against a wall, yanking us by the hair. There were about 70 or 80 teenagers arrested, then taken to different barracks. Not all of them were held for long, but I do know almost none of them had anything to do with the IRA."

Morrison explained that prolonged detainment of this kind went a way towards consolidating a previously disparate IRA. "For a lot of young people, especially city kids who'd never been out of their towns, they were suddenly in these cages and meeting older people who had been interned in the 50s," he said. "When I first went in, in 1972, an old man from Belfast was in charge of our food parcels, and he'd been interned in the 40s, with people who'd fought in the 1916 rising. All of a sudden you had huge connections with the history, with the tradition. We revered them. We could put the whole thing in context. They knew how to smuggle, escape, organise – all the experience to turn a bunch of pissed-off kids into a movement."

Then, as now, prisons acted as a crucible, with impressionable, disillusioned young people thrown in with the old hardcore, the veterans of subversive campaigns. Belatedly, the government seems to have at last clocked they're essentially running state-funded centres for fostering extremism, recently creating a task force to combat radicalisation inside.

Everyone I spoke to in Kilburn was careful not to make the comparison too direct, but current attitudes towards the Muslim community came up time and again. These days we have Mac of the Daily Mail depicting refugees as rats. As late as 1982, the Evening Standard felt comfortable running a cartoon of an imaginary film poster, advertising "the ultimate in psychopathic horror – THE IRISH". Express cartoonist Michael Cummings said he had "cartoonist's license" to reflect British views that the Irish were "extremely violent, bloody-minded, always fighting, drinking enormous amounts, [and] getting roaring drunk".

Peggy, another older woman I spoke to, told me the solution in the 70s was to keep your head down. "There were plenty of times you'd see some rough lads and know you didn't want to let them hear you talk," she said, "especially if they'd been at the football. At work, if something had happened, it was always 'effin Irish' this and 'effin Irish' that, especially from the older men, and they didn't care if you heard or not. It made you not want to speak out."

Just as Muslims today are demanded to account and apologise for the actions of a few extremists, diaspora Irish were expected to mediate the message of the IRA. "At the same time, every time something did happen, there'd always be somebody who wanted a history lesson," said Peggy. "You were expected to be this mouthpiece for a whole history and culture and nation, and to tell you the truth I didn't give a fig. Somebody would always try and make you, though."

Jeanne Rathbone has had a varied career, working as everything from a lab technician to a counsellor, to a humanist celebrant – she conducted Dave Allen's funeral, which for my granny would have been like conducting Diana's. In the 1980s she was very active in community politics in London. She spoke to me over the phone from her home in Battersea, where she has lived since leaving Ireland in the 1960s.

"We were patronised, sure, but every immigrant community everywhere gets that – I remember the headmaster of my children's school telling Irish jokes at a parents' evening, which you wouldn't get today," she said. "We had all these Irish kids barely aware of their heritage, so I began to come into schools to give these little talks on Irish heritage and culture, Patrick's Day and so on. One headteacher had a pretty strong reaction when we showed our little Irish flag, along with other things, and started shouting that she wanted no 'indoctrination' going on in her school."

"The jokes were just the tip of the iceberg," Jeanne told me, "but think about what a joke represents. It's a disguise for prejudice, and there were very real problems of alcoholism, of men being denied work and working outside the system. Being regarded as a potential terrorist – which many, many people were – is a serious thing for people's mental health, and for community cohesion."

Jeanne set up an Irish Women's Centre in Battersea. She once asked one of her visitors if she knew what a feminist was; she said she cleaned for one.

This work, and advocacy for Irish cultural respect in the GLC in the 80s, was met with indifference from the authorities, but made Jeanne a target for the far-right. "We had faeces put through our letter box, and when you used the phone you could just tell from the strange sound that we were being listened to," said Jeanne, before recalling one occasion when a man calling himself Colin phoned the house and told her son a bomb had been put on their street. "We had to evacuate, of course, and it turned out the device was a fake, and a pretty shoddy one at that, but when the police heard my accent they just weren't interested."

The Irish in Britain at the height of the Troubles were from a poor place, often on the fringes of the economy, and largely kept away from power in the media, politics and business. Now, however, Ireland is a European home to American mega-corporations, and the lifestyles of Dubliners and Londoners are distinguished by little more than how many stag-dos they have to put up with.

If the Irish experience holds a lesson for today, it's that a combination of economic success and gradual cultural familiarity can make an "out" group an "in" group, and that however intractable alienation may seem, there's a way out of prejudice and ignorance. The echoes are undeniable – a whole community held in suspicion by the reactionary right, ongoing tensions caused by British military intervention, a nation gripped by the invisible, unknowable threat of "extreme terrorism". However, recent history does offer some cyclical hope. The experience of Irish migrants in London suggests that simply locking people up is never the solution. Angry young men will always be a problem, as they always have been, but community and basic decency will persevere.

"You just get on with it," Patsy told me. "There's always somebody new to be scared of just around the corner."

We've all been here before. And we will be again.

@Lowrypalooza