People, Race and Nation in These Islands
Rayner Heppenstall highlights the problems inherent in divisions of British and Irish history along racial lines.
Not long ago, a judge in one of the London courts took occasion to criticize the marital conduct of two young people. They explained to him that they could not help beating each other and brutalizing their only child, because they were both of Irish extraction. It was, they said, “the Irish in them”. This use of racial phantasy as an alibi is not uncommon. We have all met people who viewed themselves as the interesting victims of a conflicting heredity and who therefore gave us to understand that they could not be held wholly to account for their own behaviour.
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