I was on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme last week head-to-head with Tim Pat Coogan. This was not as uncomfortable as it sounds, since I was in a London studio and he was on a line from Dublin.
Tim Pat explained that Anglo-Irish relations were now good entirely because of Tony Blair, the first British prime minister not to look down on us. When I suggested that over the past few decades the problem was less that the British looked down on us and more that we were over-sensitive, the interviewer threw in: "After all, didn't Margaret Thatcher sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement?"
At which moment Tim Pat fell back on the offensiveness of Mrs Thatcher's body language. Commenting on my view that the Irish in Britain were generally a happy lot, Tim Pat explained this was a new phenomenon: they were no longer disaffected now the Blair government had got rid of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and some of the miscarriages of justice had been addressed.
To my joy, a young woman (British second-generation Irish) who rang me later and who knew naught of Tim Pat observed: "That man you were on with was very old-fashioned." Which led me to two reflections. First, she's right: Tim Pat Coogan and his very green chums are indeed old-fashioned. And second, they're floundering.
The Bertie-and-Tony love-in is very dislocating to people of fixed prejudices. Yet since they're always going on seizing opportunities for peace they can hardly object. Hence the line that all has changed utterly since the arrival of Saint Tony and the Blessed Mo.
Over the next few weeks, the emigrant-Irish papers in London will have letters spinning the same yarn. It is, of course, rubbish.
SOME Irish in Britain have been disaffected, but by and large they were the kind of people who would be disaffected anywhere. It was not the fault of the British that many immigrants were exploited by (almost exclusively Irish) construction firms, paid no taxes or national insurance and so missed out on pensions, drank their money and ended up miserable in bed-sits living off minimum state benefits.
The grievance industry goes on about the high level of mental illness and early deaths among the Irish in Britain and blames our hosts for not looking after us well enough. The reality is that much of the mental illness has occurred mainly among lonely single men whose problems were exacerbated by leaving home: vulnerable people make bad emigrants.
And the ill-health is a result, as one researcher explained to me, of the Irish believing they are invincible - a trait for which we are notorious among the English. "I don't know how you do it," is the cry we hear frequently from English friends who left the restaurant at midnight and have just heard that we went on to a nightclub until 4 a.m. "It would kill me." The answer, of course, is that it will kill us.
And while I'm at it. Many of the "No Irish" signs outside boarding houses were a reaction to our drinking habits. Can landladies be blamed for preferring the cocoa-and-slippers brigade to the eight-pints-and-I'll-beat-any-man-in-the-house contingent?
Like Tim Pat Coogan, the grievance industry has made much over the years of how we have lived in fear because of oppressive legislation and an anti-Irish legal system. Let us take the PTA first. On the radio, Tim Pat spoke of 6,500 arrests of innocent people under the PTA since it was introduced in 1974. Apart from Irish tourists and other visitors, there are over a million Irish-born in Britain and an estimated seven to 10 million of Irish descent.
Call me a lickspittle to the British establishment, but I don't think the holding of 6,500 suspects - usually for a few hours and occasionally for a few days - is an overreaction during a quarter of a century when the IRA was blowing up bits of England.
And while the miscarriages of justice were awful, I've yet to come across a better legal system than exists in Britain or one more inclined to admit its mistakes. For the Americans, who routinely execute mental defectives, to wax eloquent about the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four drives me bonkers. Who led the campaign for their release? English people, that's who. People like the writer Robert Kee and the MP Chris Mullin.
Most Irish-born people in England came here to make a living or because they couldn't stand the narrowness and claustrophobia of home.
There was a great deal of pain and homesickness for many, but that was a fact of exile life: it was not the fault of our generally decent and tolerant hosts. Part of our whinging nationalist inheritance made us touchy and suspicious: English reserve was seen as unfriendliness, English politeness as condescension.
I KNOW very well a young second-generation Irish chap whose father worked on Irish-controlled building-sites; his mother worked as a barmaid in an Irish club. They socialised in exclusively Irish Catholic circles and denounced the English as stand-offish and superior. It took them a long time to realise their four children, all of whom were turned off their Irish heritage because they associated it with drink and republican songs, thought of themselves as English.
If being Irish in Britain was generally fine for my generation, it is wonderful for the 20 and 30 somethings. Cheap phone-calls and air fares have virtually abolished homesickness and opportunities back home mean there is no longer the sense that one can never return.
The Irish are not just liked: we inspire great affection. Now that we're self-confident and have stopped being touchy, the Brit-in-the-street is delighted with us. "He isn't a shrinking violet," I said to a BBC producer apropos John A. Murphy. "I've never met an Irish person who is," she said.
I've known in the past Irish people who would instantly have found that offensive rather than complimentary.
I give enormous credit to the effect on British public opinion of Irish broadcasters who were relaxed about their accents and identity - people like Anthony Clare, Frank Delaney and Henry Kelly. But the palm goes to Terry Wogan, who over decades on Radio 2 made millions of ordinary British people laugh at him and at themselves and was a perfect role-model for Irish emigrants. He's happy being Irish and lives happily in Britain: he loves his hosts and they love him. And that love-affair started long before St Tony or the Blessed Mo were even heard of.