You know when you’re a kid and your parents finally get on your wick so much that you think, ‘that’s it – I’m gonna run away’? At the age of 15, I actually got to London, selling scent in a chemist in King’s Cross Station for six weeks – but most children only get to the end of the road before slinking back after a few hours. To add insult to injury their families don’t even realise they are gone.
When I think of this clownery, I’m reminded of the celebrities who stay in England and bang on about Ireland, or buy a holiday home there. It’s the equivalent of running away to the end of the road for celebs who want to seem a bit special. Like a luxury belief, it’s a luxury passport. I call them the Lie-rish, as the foundation on which their ‘belief’ is built is so false.
We’re all aware of those hilariously sulky Remoaners who started fussing about having an Irish grandparent when they lost the Brexit referendum – and now the famous are doing it too
We’re all aware of those hilariously sulky Remoaners who started fussing about having an Irish grandparent when they lost the Brexit referendum – the poor little oofums – and now the famous are doing it too. Take Steve Coogan, who somewhere along the line turned from a sparky bloke you’d like to hang out with to a left-wing Alan Partridge, apparently utterly unaware of how pompous his pronouncements sound. Like this one: ‘I’ve always felt that I have slight antipathy towards the British flag I’ve been raised with. It’s not like a contempt for it – it’s just holding the Establishment at arm’s length because of history.’ Hmmm – would that be the bit of history that saw us stand alone against the Nazi war machine while the Emerald Isle was conveniently ‘neutral’, one wonders? Coogan then intoned, ‘I am a part of the Irish diaspora.’ (Is it just me who finds the taking up of the traditionally Jewish word ‘diaspora’ by every Tom, Dick and Paddy rather repulsive?) He continues: ‘I’ve always felt like I lived in the middle of the Irish Sea because I feel like I’ve been spending all my summers in Ireland… Even though I was born in England, people would say “When are you coming home?”’ In a foul yet oddly profound statement, he adds, ‘I always think that if I get captured by Isis, I’m less likely to get my head chopped off with an Irish passport than a British one.’ Well, Isis are certainly Nazis, and Nazis have certainly been friendlier towards the Irish than the British in the past, so the fool may have something here.
Let me make it clear that when I talk about ‘Ireland’ in this context, I’m not talking about beautiful, brave Northern Ireland here. No, I’m talking about Eire or whatever it calls itself. That earthly paradise of pink-cheeked colleens which was neutral in the second world war and where there are statues of Nazi sympathisers in public parks. Sean Russell, who travelled to Nazi Germany in 1940 to seek arms, support and training for the IRA’s campaign against Britain, pleasingly died from a perforated ulcer while on a German U-boat off the coast of Galway in August 1940. He is commemorated with statue in Fairview Park in Dublin. This is, after all, the country where anti-Semitism is probably the worst in Europe, despite having a tiny Jewish population of around 2,700. Disturbingly, according to a recent 200-page report by the great investigative reporter David Collier:
‘The spread of anti-Semitism throughout the Irish mainstream is clearly worse than in almost any other Western nation. It requires a massive educational drive to even begin to unravel some of the damage. In Ireland, anti-Jewish racism spreads within the corridors of power and unlike in the United Kingdom or the United States, appears to be as much driven from the top-down as the reverse. Some Irish politicians are obsessed about attacking Israel and Zionism, treating it in a manner different from the way they treat all other international issues. Irish politicians share material that is clearly fake and that comes from social-media accounts that are blatantly anti-Semitic. The argument that allegations of anti-Semitism are about stifling “criticism of Israel” is used to shield some of the most horrific anti-Jewish racism imaginable.’
The Irish establishment – including the artistic establishment like Kneecap – have always had a thing about the Jews. Is it a Biblical thing, the way Jewish schoolkids in New York used to get beaten up by Irish classmates for ‘killing Jesus’? It seems somewhat simple-minded, but then some folk are. What’s far weirder are people of Jewish origin like Daniel Day-Lewis (Jewish mum) who in 1987 nabbed an Irish passport and blew half a million quid on Castlekevin, a country house in County Wicklow. This led his friend Stephen Frears to harmlessly quip, ‘I knew Daniel before he was Irish’ to which Day-Lewis hissy-fitted ‘I never knew Frears before he was a facetious slob’.
Why are the Lie-rish so sensitive? Is it because they know they’re phoneys? Is it because they crave in the Emerald Isle things they’d consider ‘too white’ on the mainland? Perhaps the unspoken secret of the Lie-rish is that they like it there because parts of it – the rural parts – are like England before that nice Mr Blair decided that open borders were dead groovy. We’ve got the English equivalent in people like Billy Bragg who bang on about the glories of multiculturalism and then go and live in a dirty great mansion in one of the whitest counties in England. Overcrowding and an end to Englishness for plebby old thee – but not for lovely famous me.
But the irony is that the Irish are getting very angry indeed about immigration from faraway shores themselves now – and the ethnic group which their masters wanted them to turn on, the Jews, haven’t featured. And it must be said that Irish anti-immigration activists are a good deal fonder of arson and fire-bombing than their more phlegmatic English counterparts.
Still, I’m thoroughly in sympathy with the showbiz section of the Lie-rish. You want to go there – and we want you to go there too. Leave London, leave the acting work so readily found here, leave the lovely well-paying voiceovers to British actors who don’t aim to make themselves seem superior by making their country seem worse. And take Ed Sheeran with you; the Yorkshire-born, Suffolk-raised crooner recently told Louis Theroux, ‘I class my culture as Irish. My dad’s got seven brothers and sisters. We’d spend all of our holidays in Ireland. My first musical experiences were in Ireland, I grew up with trad music in the house. So I identify culturally as Irish, but I was obviously born and raised in Britain. I don’t overthink it but I do feel like my culture is something that I’m really proud of and grew up with and want to express. And I feel like just because I was born in Britain doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to just be [British], there’s loads of people I know that are half this or quarter this.’
Might I venture that Sheeran is half half-wit and quarter cretin? I’ll leave the other 25 per cent for you to fill in. But whatever he is, he’s certainly – like Shane MacGowan (born in Kent) and Kevin Rowland (born in Staffordshire) – 100 per cent Lie-rish.
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