ABSTRACT
It’s an insidious thing. If you talk about anti-Irish racism1 people look at you as if you have two heads, like what is the problem? You are ‘white’, you speak English, they don’t understand this huge cultural difference. (Anne)
A cultural difference between? (Breda) Between English people, white English-speaking people and Irish
people. And English friends sort of said to me ‘Oh you are all, you know, you do go on a bit about the fact that you are Irish’. And I don’t notice, but possibly I do. But I only do it now because I am living in these circumstances. Whereas, if I was still at home it would not be an issue. (Anne)
What do you think the cultural difference is? (Breda) The Irish psyche is just different. The way we look at things. The way
we approach things. And there again, I am generalising, I am talking about the people that I know. And there again, they mostly are people from my generation, mostly from Dublin. Having said that, you know, they are from different backgrounds, different you know from all over the place . . . you could identify very clearly differences between ourselves as Irish people and English people. English society, if you like, in terms of like, language is one thing, that’s the way of speaking. (Julie)
. . . People are inclined to forget the struggle that people have in the North of Ireland. I mean it’s fine to be in Dublin and just you are so far away from it. You are not exposed to it, therefore you sort of take – a lot of people accuse Dublin people of having sympathy with the English. So, I don’t know, it doesn’t affect my life now . . . I don’t go around saying ‘Oh well, you know, the British are responsible for this or’. But you say when in Rome, you know. And I find it’s easier, as I said to assimilate. If you are living in a host country you just live the way everybody else does. Try not to rock the boat. (Fionnuala)
(Group discussion 3, London)
By looking ‘white’ and speaking English, Anne does not immediately fit the category of ‘prescribed otherness’ in England (Ang 1994: 11). Prescribed performances of Irish otherness do not include the uninvited assertion of
Hiberno-English) and looking ‘white’, the presence of most Irish migrants is not at first a ‘declaration of . . . belonging somewhere else’ (ibid.). The declaration has to be articulated, communicated, and asserted even if already indicated by accent. The seeable is not always self-evident but requires narratives that ‘tell’ what the body may not ‘show’ (Bell 1996). It is narrative that undoes assumptions of ‘pure whiteness’ and destabilises the way ‘whiteness’ and race are understood (Fraser 1999a: 113).
