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Migrants’ suffering
• READING Peter Beresford Ellis’s review of my book, The Irish in Post-war Britain (Review, August 13), made me question the old saying “all publicity is good publicity”.
Clearly Beresford Ellis did not like my “skewed history”, and that’s fine, if regrettable. But the review misrepresents my arguments on a number of key points. I do not doubt for one moment that the Irish who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s were greeted with signs “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs”, although as I said in the book (p123), it was more likely that the term “Coloured” was used then.
He suggests my book “seems to be encouraging people to believe that such signs were merely proverbial myths”.
This could not be further from the truth: my observation was merely that it is significant and interesting that such signs still occupy a central place in the collective memory of the Irish in Britain nearly half a century later. He then goes on to say that I do not give any sense “of the suffering that most Irish migrants went through as they made the transition from their homeland to England”.
Three out of the five chapters of the book do exactly just that, and I was beginning to wonder at this stage had he actually read the book. Contrary to what he says, I do discuss the Connolly Association and the Irish Democrat (pp188-9), as well as the Irish Post (p199). As for the other organisations or bodies he mentions, this book is concerned with the everyday experiences of the Irish in post-war Britain for the reasons outlined at length in the introduction, not with particular Irish republican or nationalist groups. Ultimately only readers can decide whether it is good or bad “real” history, if there is such a thing as “real” history. The type of history that I am seeking to write is one which seeks to reconstruct how people made sense of the world around them.
ENDA DELANEY
East Lothian
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