Introduction

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Notes

 1. Bennett, Havoc , 14, 12, 25. Subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text.

 2. Cambresis describes the ‘wild Irish’ as cannibals, murderers and robbers indulgent in sodomy and incest: ‘Ireland, a countrie, the more barren of good things, the more replenished with actions of bloud, murther, and louthsome outrages, which to anie good reader are greevous and irksome to be read and considered.’ Giraldus Cambresis, The Irish History Composed and Written by Giraldus Cambresis, and Translated into English…, by John Hooker…, vol. II of Raphael Holinshead et al., The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles… (London, 1577), Epistle Dedicatore. Quoted in Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland , 75.

 3. See Ellis, Tudor Ireland , 319.

 4. Edmund Spenser, quoted by Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts , 50–51.

 5. See Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger .

 6. Walvin, Passage to Britain , 53.

 7. Anthias and Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries , 44–45.

 8. See Negra, ‘The New Primitives’.

 9. Sean O'Hagan, ‘Living with Fear’, Observer, 17 July 2005. Available from http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1529982,00.html (accessed 6 September 2005). Ruth Dudley Edwards, in an argument designed primarily to critique the republicanism of John McDonnell, rightly warns against simplistic conflation of the two very different experiences of the Irish and Muslim populations in Britain. See Ruth Dudley Edwards, ‘Don't Labour the Irish Immigrant Point’, Irish Sunday Independent, 22 August 2004. Available from http://www.ruthdudleyedwards.co.uk/Journalism04.htm (accessed 23 December 2005). Charles Moore, in the Daily Telegraph, effectively makes the argument for prejudice:

‘The Brian Paddicks of the day would have been appallingly negligent [during the IRA bombing campaigns in Britain] if they had not concentrated their investigations among the Irish. And the vigilance of the public, which the police then and now rightly call for, inevitably directed itself towards Irish neighbours, Irish accents, Irish pubs. So it must be with Muslims in Britain.’ Available from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/07/09/do09.xml (accessed 1 March 2006) (Charles Moore, ‘Telegraph Opinion’, Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2005‘)

10. For a different angle on this comparison of the Irish with contemporary immigrants and asylum seekers, see Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience . On the Irish as the ‘largest ethnic minority in contemporary Britain’, see Anthias and Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries, 44.

11. Sivanandan, ‘Challenging Racism’. On Ireland and postcolonialism see Kennedy, ‘Modern Ireland’ and Howe, Ireland and Empire .

12. Eagleton, Heathcliff, 127–28.

13. See Hickman and Walter, ‘Deconstructing Whiteness’ and Walter, ‘Contemporary Irish Settlement in London’.

14. Greenslade, ‘White Skin, White Masks’, 216.

15. Sivanandan, quoted by Fekete, ‘The Emergence of Xeno-racism’.

16. Foster, ‘“An Irish Power in London”’, 12.

17.Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , 3.