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Irish rose above jibes
• I WAS in total agreement with Peter Berresford Ellis’s critique of Edna Delaney’s The Irish in Post-war Britain (A blinkered distortion of our history, August 14). The use of a Bernard Canavan painting to illustrate Berresford Ellis’s article was masterful. Edna Delaney was sheltered in the lofty air of academia. He was not one of the Irish diaspora.
The Irish response to the “Vacancies. No Irish need apply” placards was thus:
“No Irish need apply”.
The hand that wrote it wrote it well
For the same is writ
On the gates of Hell,
“No Irish need apply!”
We rose above the racists’ jibes, taunts and discrimination, got on with our work in hospitals, building sites and domestic or catering service to build for ourselves a better life in what we considered England to be, the New Jerusalem.
Doris Daly
Thornhill Road, N1 |
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