Hibernophobia

Which medieval sources supplied the stereotype

English attitudes towards the Gaelic Irish and their culture go back to the reign of Henry II, and the mirror of them is filed here under Anglophobia. In 1155 Pope Adrian IV, himself an Englishman, issued the bull Laudabiliter granting Henry permission to conquer Ireland in order to strengthen papal control over the Irish church, and called the Irish a rude and barbarous nation. Modern historians dispute whether the bull ever existed. The Norman invasion began in 1169 with the backing of Pope Alexander III, who ratified Laudabiliter and likewise called the Irish a barbarous nation with filthy practices.

Gerald of Wales visited in 1183 and again in 1185, when he accompanied Henry's son John on his expedition, and produced two books from it, a topography and a conquest narrative, both of which stayed in circulation for centuries afterwards. His Ireland was rich and its people were not: they used their fields mostly for pasture, cultivated little and sowed less, and the problem, in his account, was not the soil but the lack of industry of those who should have worked it. That laziness meant the minerals in the hidden veins of the earth went unmined, and nobody devoted themselves to flax, wool or any mechanical or mercantile craft. Dedicated only to leisure, he concluded, they depended on animals for a living and lived like animals themselves.

His views were not unusual. Similar passages appear in William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh, and Archbishop Anselm had already accused the Irish of exchanging their wives as freely as other men exchange their horses. Gerald was sharper still on marriage, calling them a filthy people wallowing in vice.

Four or five authors, in other words, supplied a description still echoed centuries later.

How religion turned it into law

Hostility deepened as the Irish remained Roman Catholic despite coercion to convert under Edward VI and his successors. The penal laws were written to marginalise the Catholic population and press it towards Protestantism by removing essential parts of ordinary life:

• owning land
• voting
• education

The result was a religious majority governed by a religious minority, which produced continuous social conflict, and discriminatory law produced uprisings and wars in turn, each of which damaged the relationship further. During the Great Famine in the middle of the nineteenth century some evangelical Protestants attached conversion to their relief work among starving Catholics. Catholicism remained the religion of the majority regardless.

Where the sentiment travelled

Anti-Irish feeling followed Irish migration to Great Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand, fed both by political propaganda and by the attitudes of the populations the migrants arrived among. The Irish were not widely accepted where they settled and often struggled to find work.

Political cartooning did the visual work: one British cartoon presented the Irish as inferior wild animals with no self-control. In the United States the Irish immigrant population entered politics as a way of climbing the socioeconomic ladder, and met discrimination from the native population in the process.

Within Ireland the sentiment also runs internally, along social, ethnic and cultural lines, and in Northern Ireland the sectarian, cultural, religious and political conflict is known as the Troubles.

What is left of it

The modern form no longer rests on immigration or religious tension. It surfaces instead in individuals who discriminate on the basis of a bad personal experience, in ethnic stereotypes that have never quite gone, and in the Great Famine being used against Irish people as a reminder of their past.

That last habit is the oldest part of the pattern. The medieval accusation was that the Irish did not work their own rich land. Using a famine as an insult is the same accusation with the causation removed.