We know all about the fear of ‘unvetted’ single male migrants. We were their chief exporter

“Unvetted”, unattached single male migrants are a terror to their host society. Especially when they are gathered together in hostels with no families. We ought to know – they used to be us.

In 1961, when I was three years old, 41,746 males and 2,561 females were sentenced to prisons or borstals in England and Wales. Of these, 3,267 males and 230 females stated their place of birth as the Republic of Ireland. Irish-born men and women therefore constituted more than 8 per cent of the total prison intake in England and Wales that year.

Since the proportion of the population of England and Wales born in the Republic was at the time about 2 per cent, it is obvious that the Irish were grossly over-represented among criminals. These figures, moreover, did not include those born in Northern Ireland or the children of Irish immigrants.

There were no statistics to show what kind of crimes these Irish migrants had been convicted of. But Matthew Russell interviewed police officers, welfare workers, clergy and prison governors for a long article called The Irish Delinquent in England published in 1964 in Studies.

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He wrote that “All agreed on a number of points. The Irishman’s main trouble is drink. This will bring him into conflict with the law, either directly (charged with drunkenness) or indirectly (crimes of violence committed while inflamed by drink, or thefts committed either while under the influence of alcohol or with a view to getting more money for drink or to balance a budget depleted through over-spending on drink).”

This association of the Irish immigrant with crime, vice and disorder was long established in England. As early as 1751, the great novelist Henry Fielding was complaining about uncontrolled Irish immigration to London: “when we consider the number of these wretches, it is a nuisance which will appear to be big with every moral and political mischief.”

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The Scottish historian and thinker Thomas Carlyle described Irish immigrants as “the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder”. The pioneering explorer of urban life in London, Henry Mayhew, reckoned of its criminal class that “the habitual criminals of London are said to be, in nine cases out of 10, ‘Irish Cockneys’, that is persons born of Irish parents in the Metropolis”. In 1911, Irish immigrants were five times more likely than anyone else to go to prison in England and 10 times more likely in Scotland.

Irish writers did not deny this reality. The hit play in London in 1961 was Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark. It centres on five brothers from Mayo living in Coventry and expressing their manhood through drinking and fighting. It was greeted by most London critics as proof of the savagery of the immigrant Irish invaders.

One of them, Felix Barker of the Evening News, wrote that “If there is a single Irishman who hasn’t been deported from England by next weekend, I shall write to the Home Secretary. I shall be enclosing tickets for the current play at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. In A Whistle in the Dark by Thomas Murphy he will see just what bog vipers we are nursing in our bosom.”

The English authorities did in fact try deportation. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 gave magistrates the power to order the expulsion of Irish immigrants even for very minor offences. Ironically, the main concern of the Irish authorities about criminals coming into the Republic related to these returning Irish deportees. It was very bad form for the Brits to send our felons back – agreeing to feck off to England had long been an alternative to a prison sentence in Ireland.

As Russell wondered “How the Irish police, who have always shown themselves anxious to get rid of local criminals, will resolve this conflict of loyalties is a problem which will be watched with interest by all students of psychology...

“So long as he remained in England (which heretofore he was quite prepared to do) the Irish criminal was not the object of much concern in this country. But now, faced with a steady stream of these people returning to Ireland, there is need for concern.”

Some of the over-representation of Irish citizens in English crime statistics may have been down to prejudice. But most of it was undoubtedly a reflection of social reality. The main cause was obvious: groups of young men lived together in poor quality, overcrowded accommodation, and worked like dogs on building sites during the week. Going to the pub at the weekends and getting tanked up was their outlet.

Did this justify anti-Irish prejudice in England? Of course not. Bigotry is always ignorant and stupid. It blames the majority for the sins of a minority. It dehumanises individuals by turning them into cyphers for the group they supposedly represent.

How do young male asylum seekers in Ireland now compare to their Irish migrant counterparts in England in the 1960s? They are, after all, similar in age, gender, experiences of displacement and congregation in dreary accommodation.

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But there is an obvious difference: the young men in the asylum system in today’s Ireland are much more orderly than the Irish in England were. They don’t drink much, partly for cultural reasons, partly because they don’t have the money. Fighting among them is rare, certainly in comparison with the Irish lads who used to beat the bejesus out of each other outside English pubs on Friday and Saturday nights.

According to the Garda, “Notwithstanding isolated local incidents, An Garda Síochána has not recorded any significant increase in criminal activity or public order issues directly caused by international protection applicants at this time”. The force “has not seen a requirement to increase Garda resources in any area directly due to the current accommodation of international protection applicants”.

If the general standard of behaviour of the vast majority of male asylum seekers in Ireland had been used as the test for allowing our own emigrants to settle in England, how many more would have been sent packing?