Ah you're a Catholic!

Appleday11 · 2026-02-24T19:50:40+00:00

I moved to England to work last year. I'm Irish. When I arrived at my workplace, one of my colleagues said "Ah you are Irish, this is a nice city, there is a Catholic church down the road that you can go to". I think she was trying to be helpful but I thought it was quite bizarre. I'm not Catholic and I told her so. Second time - I was out in the pub with a mixed group of people. Some of them I had never met before. One man said "ah you're Irish, you're a Catholic!" I told him Im not. Third time- I was at another group. A woman said to me "you are Irish. Ah so you like such and such. And you are a Catholic". I told her I am not. I found it strange as I have never really thought about religiom. Do some people here think that all Irish people are Catholics? My family were not religious at all and I was never brought up any religion

Coffeeandbooks88 · 28/02/2026 07:31

DuchessDandelion · 27/02/2026 23:10

I've read that the Scottish were actually very dominant in colonising Ireland

Yes they did but the SNP like to pretend that didn't happen. I always why it is just the English that get the hatred. 🤷

mathanxiety · 28/02/2026 02:30

Carla786 · 28/02/2026 00:56

When you call the famine 'so-called', are you implying it was deliberately implemented? British policies were horrible, but that isn't the same thing.

Show quote history

There are many serious articles and books putting forth the well.evidenced argument that this was a man made disaster.

On a local level, many landlords took advantage of the dire straits of their tenants to clear them off their lands - some paid their passage abroad and some simply forcibly evicted them and left them to fend for themselves on the side of the road. On a government level, there was really nobody advocating any measures that would put food in people's mouths. The best the government could come up with was a scheme of public works in which starving people were made to perform hard physical labour in return for a few pennies to purchase non existent food. You can still see the straight roads built through bogs and the straight dry stone walls built up the sides of mountains.

The attitude of the administration was that the lazy, feckless Irish had got what they deserved, and maybe the tragedy of starvation would teach them to be more like the thrifty, hardworking English. At a fundamental level, the government despised the Irish. There were several years of starvation in which no meaningful efforts were made to feed the starving, and in fact the advantages of far fewer Irish were openly discussed.

The last decade or two have seen some really good studies of the events of 1845 - 1849.

Older histories are excellent resources too, including The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham Smith.

The topic should be better known.

Carla786 · 28/02/2026 00:56

DuchessDandelion · 28/02/2026 00:28

I got distracted before I could finish my post, I was going to say...

There has been so much harm done to the Irish and Northern Irish by the British and much of it within living memory, that just because I or my family weren't responsible for it, or because the Good Friday Agreement came into being when I was a small child, doesn't mean I'm going to judge those who still feel so strongly.

It's been less than a generation since the GFA and it will take more than one generation to heal the trauma and harm done to generations of people.

As another poster mentioned, the consequences of the history between the UK, the ROI and NI are still felt today and remain very relevant. Its a massive oversight that this isn't taught properly.

Unfortunately, its not uncommon to encounter racism against the Irish even now, the same racism that when I was younger and more innocent, I believed had died out before I was born. But then, I was also naive enough to believe anti-semitism ended when the Allies discovered the Nazi concentration camps(!)

The only Irish history I was taught at school was the anti-Irish racism that was rife in Britain in the c19th & c20th centuries - it was every bit as shocking as learning about the racism that led to the Nazis villifying the Jews & the resulting Holocaust. At some point I picked up on the so-called 'Irish Potato Famine'.

I'm not certain why the history isn't taught in British schools but I suspect the fact that's its both so recent and so raw is part of the reason.

(And also perhaps because my parents generation knew about it because it was part of their daily lives / news cycle. It never has been for my generation.)

The Germans didn't flinch from their Nazi history after WWII. If British people want to reach a point where hatred is no longer passed down the generations, then we need to ensure that the average person is educated far more about the history between our countries and the very real consequences still experienced today.

If younger generations on both sides can listen to each with an attitude of respectful listening, then we can start to heal the harm done, but we need to be willing to learn without knee-jerk emotional reactions.

You cannot compare the enmity that exists to the sibling-like relationship the UK has with France, that's ridiculous. And while yes, men returned home from WWII forever changed, that was a war entered into for very different reasons - and Germany has faced up to its history in a way Britain still hasn't.

We can't get upset or frustrated at anti-British sentiment because it's in the past when most don't know the history, otherwise we risk sounding like a certain type of American(!)

When we can acknowledge and teach our colonialism history properly that we can truly celebrate the things about us which we can be proud of.