“The power of the Irish over theBritons is great”

“What is there more marvellous,” an eighth-century Gaelic poem asks, “than the incomparable great story?” The great story of the Irish in Britain is frequently told as a triumph over racism and exclusion – from the era of signs declaring “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” to 21st century success in business, the arts and entertainment.

The Irish built the roads, canals and housing estates. They cleared away the debris of Luftwaffe bombing raids. In the words of the ballad ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’, they “sweated blood and they washed down mud with pints and quarts of beer”. It is a story of hardship and forbearance whose privations are hard to imagine for the modern Irish in Britain.

But the legend of the Fusiliers – the men who built Britain – and of the ‘Ryanair Generation’ of educated young people that followed them, has obscured an extraordinary story. To know it we must travel far back, before the great divisions of modern history.

I was born in London to Irish parents but returned with them to live in Ireland. The ‘old struggle’ between the nations defined the politics of the world in which I grew