McSweeney Astray
Some thoughts on Irish identity in England and the fall of Morgan
A quick trip down memory lane from periods when I worked with English colleagues in English universities.
I once said something including “usen’t” and an English colleague informed me that “didn’t used to” was the correct formulation.
A colleague replied to a point I raised at a meeting with “That sounds very Irish!”
And long before, at an interview for a place on a teacher training course in London, one of the interviewers read out the names of my referees and said, “All very Irish.”
Soft ways of marking difference whilst denying hostility.
The position of Irish people in England is hard to define exactly. On the one hand, we can live and work there without any red tape, as can UK citizens in Ireland. On the other, we’re not English; our accents, spoken grammar, and often our names signal us as outsiders.
A surprising number of educated and responsible English people think that Ireland (the Republic) is still, in some sense, part of the UK and that being Irish is similar to being a Scouser or a Geordie, simply an outgrowth of the core British national identity. A non-updated imperial mind map is still at work.
Most long-term Irish residents in England adapt to this without difficulties. Some make an effort to sand down their accents and “standardise” their spoken grammar. Irish people in England have risen to high positions in business and other areas, and in many cases their Irishness is hardly noticed.
Another layer of complication is added to the story by the large number of English people who have acquired Irish nationality through a parent or grandparent, especially post-Brexit. I’ll deal with our “law of return” properly another day.
All of which brings us to Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recently departed Chief of Staff, a man who arrived in England from Macroom in County Cork at the age of 18.
To get to the position from which he resigned, he must have outmanoeuvred and infuriated innumerable pukka chaps and chapesses with the educational and personal background that smooths one’s path to a high position in the British state and commentariat.
The approval that greeted his downfall among the progressive commentariat carried an unmistakable tone of triumph, a “finally we got the bastard” sentiment. That same glee would likely not have surfaced if someone with an identical CV to McSweeney’s had been, say, someone called Charles Taylor‑Smyth, an Oxbridge graduate who went straight into a parliamentary aide role, then became a SPAD and ultimately chief of staff.
What was called “divisiveness” and “failure to listen” in McSweeney’s case would probably have been characterised as “clarity of vision” and “determination” in the case of “Charles.”
Come now, the commentators you criticise were only reflecting deep unease in the PLP!
That reinforces my point. It can’t have been much fun for ambitious English people to take orders from a foreigner, especially not an Irishman, and from Cork, to boot.
But Irish people are not foreigners!
Neither foreigners nor non-foreigners, that’s the point I’m trying to make. Irish people in Britain are mostly racially unmarked but are definitely socially marked, especially when things go wrong. We can mostly pass as part of the ingroup, but not always.
Modern British identity was formed to a considerable extent by anti-Catholicism, and who were the Ur Catholics for the British? That’s right. Attempts to make Ireland British and Protestant were central to the early modern British state. Religious passions have long faded but sometimes a secularised residue of anxiety bubbles to the surface.
None of this is to defend Morgan McSweeney’s record in office. His strategic choices, political judgements and exercise of power are as open to criticism as anyone else’s in his position, and many of those criticisms seem justified. What interests me is not whether he worked well or badly, rather the faint, persistent sense that he was somehow out of place.
Irish people in England occupy a strange middle ground: insiders by law and skin colour, but not by feeling. McSweeney’s career, and the relish with which his fall has been greeted, exposes a tension that’s part of British identity: how to deal with the Irish.
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As an American who’s always wondering about the subject matter addressed in this article, I need to say, ‘thank you’ for this little bit of insight. My grandparents emigrated to the US around the turn of the nineteenth century, attempting to escape the second famine and find a new life in the USA. My mother’s people were from Tipperary and my father’s from Cork! I never really knew any of my grandparents, which didn’t really matter as it apples to this discussion since they considered everything about themselves to be a deeply held secret. Such things were never discussed. As to my parents, they spent most of their lives - children of the Great Depression, as part of what was once termed, ‘the greatest generation’, always trying and failing to keep anyone from knowing that they were, ‘shanty Irish’. This is a long way (is there any other?) of thanking you, as I’ve always wondered how the Brits view the Irish amongst them just as much as I wonder how the Irish view their Centuries-long keepers. Once again, thanks to you.