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Abstract
The Irish have become embedded in the ‘diaspora space’ of England so that their presence is taken for granted. This article explores the ways in which films made by English directors include Irish characters in apparently unplanned and incidental ways which reflect their own assumptions and those of their audiences about the ‘natural’ place of the Irish in English social landscapes. It interrogates the understandings and intentions of the director (Richard Eyre), screenwriter (Patrick Marber) and actors (Judi Dench, Andrew Simpson) in the film Notes on a Scandal which adds an Irish character to Zoë Heller's novel. Many other narrative films contain small clues, usually denoted by voices, but also ‘looks’, culture and roles. These sources enrich the evidence available to social scientists analysing the deep entanglement of the Irish with both the long-settled and more recently arrived populations living in England.
Notes
1. Hickman et al., ‘The Limitations of Whiteness’, 174–5.
2. CitationHickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing “Race”’, 296–9.
3. CitationKimber, ‘Race and Equality’, 31.
4. CitationHickman, ‘I Am But I Am Not’, 84.
5. CitationBrah, Cartographies, 181.
6. Cited in CitationHickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing “Race”’, 297.
7. CitationSmart, Personal Life, 3.
8. CitationHickman and Walter, Discrimination and the Irish Community, 210–12.
9. Walter, ‘Tradition and Ethnic Interaction’, 263. In statistically matched samples contacted in 1972–75, three out of eighty-nine in Luton had been born in Britain compared with fifty-nine out of one hundred and fifteen in Bolton.
10. Nash, Of Irish Descent, 43.
11. CitationMorrison, Things My Mother Never Told Me, 59.
12. CitationBradley, ‘Sport and the Contestation of Ethnic Identity’.
13. CitationO'Leary, ‘The Cult of Respectability’, 135.
14. CitationWalter, ‘“Shamrocks Growing Out of their Mouths”’, 57–65.
15. O'Connor, The Irish in Britain, 165.
16. CitationLennon, McAdam, and O'Brien, Across the Water, 215.
17. CitationWalter, ‘Voices in Other Ears’.
18. Howard, ‘Constructing the Irish in Britain’, 110–15.
19. See, for example, CitationByrne, White Lives, 22.
20. CitationCurtis, Apes and Angels.
21. CitationThird, ‘“Does the Rug Match the Carpet?”’, 229.
22. CitationThird, ‘“Does the Rug Match the Carpet?”’, 246.
23. The ‘Irish 2 Project’ (2000–02), entitled ‘The Second-generation Irish: A Hidden Population in Multi-ethnic Britain’, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK. It was directed by Bronwen Walter, with co-applicants Mary J. Hickman and Joseph Bradley and Senior Research Associate Sarah Morgan.
24. CitationMacAmhlaigh, An Irish Navvy, 20.
25. Interviewees in Luton in 1972 told me this. I am grateful to members of the Irish Diaspora List who elaborated at length on the theme. Ultan Cowley identified the term ‘the gimp’.
26. Cited in CitationHuck, ‘Clothes Make the Irish’, 280.
27. Guardian, 6 October 2000, 2, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/oct/06/culture.features (accessed 18 May 2010).
28. I am grateful to Séan Campbell, Anglia Ruskin University, for pointing out these connections.
29. CitationHeller, Notes on a Scandal.
30. CitationBradshaw, ‘Notes on a Scandal’.
31. CitationBriscoe, ‘Queen of Sheba’.
32. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_a_Scandal_(film) (accessed 18 May 2010).
33. http://www.totalfilm.com/people/richard-eyre (accessed 14 August 2007).
34. http://www.totalfilm.com/people/patrick-marber (accessed 18 May 2010).
35. CitationDavis, ‘Race and the Residuum’; CitationWalter, Outsiders Inside, 98–9.
36. CitationDwyer, ‘Lust, Actually’, 71.
37. Hickman and Walter, Discrimination, 193–4.
38. Personal letter, 9 June 2009.
39. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judi_Dench (accessed 18 May 2010).
40. CitationScanlon, ‘Irish Stereotypes Left on Cutting Room Floor’, 4.
41. Alberto Cavalcanti, Went the Day Well?, Ealing Studios.
42. CitationWalter, ‘Strangers on the Inside’, 282–6.
43. CitationRomney, ‘The Veteran British Director’.
44. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bend_It_Like_Beckham (accessed 19 May 2010).
45. www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article…/Bend-It-Like-Beckham-Cert-132.html (accessed 19 May 2010).
46. www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Bend-It-Like-Beckham-397.html (accessed 19 May 2010).
47. O'Connor, The Irish in Britain, 139.
48. CitationIfekwunigwe, Scattered Belongings, 170–93; CitationModel and Fisher, ‘Unions between Blacks and White’; CitationWalter, ‘English/Irish Hybridity’.
49. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 209.
50. CitationHickman, ‘Immigration and Monocultural (Re)Imaginings’.
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