Punch Magazine anti irish propaganda 1867 Guy Fawkes
How it must have made the English chattering classes and gentry laugh. After all, back then the Irish were not regarded as fit to rule themselves. While the Celtic Tiger may now seem rather timid and while we like to present ourselves as urbane and modern, the British media interpretation of us remains very much as caricatured as in the days of Punch.
Look at the roles played by Irish people on TV. Back in the 1970s who could forget O’Reilly as the useless Irish builder in Fawlty Towers.
The same actor played a one-armed Irish dishwasher in Robin’s Nest.
Of course, back then it was common practice to have a go at the Irish. The stock in trade of every comedian’s repertoire contained the proverbial, Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman, with the latter usually the butt of the punchline.
The odious Bernard Manning was overtly racist. Jim Davidson, the soldiers’ favoured comedian, loved taking the ‘mickey’ out of the Paddies, all allegedly in the name of good old-fashioned fun.
Technically speaking we live in a more politically correct world. Sometimes too politically correct. Muslims seem to be the most protected of minority species. It’s totally taboo to say anything about them or their religion without an avalanche of thought police and moral custodians landing on your head.
But what of the Irish?
Surely in this more integrated age we are more protected than before. Manning is dead. Chubby Brown is confined to video and Jim Davidson is off screen. But take a look at your TV.
In everyone’s favourite, Coronation Street, the main Irish character for many years was a wife-beating alcoholic killer with a voice that could cut glass. Nowadays, the O’Connors are portrayed as some kind of rural Irish stereotypes more likely to be found in a version of Glenroe 35 years ago when The Late Late Show was still introducing sex to the Irish nation after Saturday night confession.
Mind you, Coronation Street also gave us the bunny boiler of an Irish nurse. The Irish depicted in EastEnders did not fare much better and in 1997 several episodes led to the intervention of the Irish ambassador to Britain.
Watch any episode of The Bill and the Irish invariably turn up as prostitutes, villains, alcoholics or drug addicts.
Even Channel 4’s trendy Hollyoaks has the most motley crew of Irish characters ever assembled outside of a Sean O’Casey play. One is a Belfast cross-dressing bisexual who has a brother who is HIV-positive and who came into the show as a bully and now contents himself with whatever illegal scam is going. They both have a female friend, Irish of course, who is a loud and foul-mouthed floozy.
The dysfunctional McQueens, a family of second-generation Liverpool Irish Catholics who find the time between sleeping with just about everybody, including the local priest, to sell images of Christ on toast and fill Holy Water bottles.
In the appropriately named Shameless drama, the two main protagonists are the Gallaghers and the Maguires and they don’t come more criminal, more stupid and more hopeless than these two gormless families.
It seems as if old-fashioned stereotyping is alive and well in the British media and we are still being portrayed as an underclass when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a storyline or character. Naturally, if there is an opportunity for a priest in a storyline, so much the better because, in the British media, Catholicism is inextricably linked to the Irish.
So if a priest is required, it will invariably be an Irish one but of the stage ‘oirish’ version.
One could be oversensitive about these things but sometimes it’s useful to notice how things are really being portrayed in the media as racial stereotyping of white ethnic groups is more subtle and subliminal than before.
We Irish are noted for our sense of humour and for making people laugh. We just need to make sure that the intention behind our portrayal is to make people laugh with us and not at us.