Hate Crimes – the Lesson Unlearned
My family moved from Dublin to London in the early 1960s. A large Irish immigrant family. We did not move into an Irish community. Maybe things would have been easier if we had. As kids growing up in London, my brothers and sisters and I quickly became aware that we were unliked and unwanted – we simply accepted that this was the way of things – as children do.
At school there was a lot of teasing, name-calling, mimicking our accents, Irish jokes and so on – but it was bearable – just.
I have to say that we were never hit or beaten up. This was probably due to the fact that we had an older brother who would take on anyone. Mess with us and you messed with him. Mess with him and you wouldn’t bother again – it just wasn’t worth it.
When the “The Troubles” erupted in Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s feelings towards us took a turn for the worse and stayed that way for many years. We were getting a taste of what other minority groups had had to put up with for far longer than us. I won’t bore you with stories about how we “suffered,” if that’s the right word, but we lived through it and learned to cope with varying shades of open hostility. As such, therefore, I feel well qualified to write about prejudice, hate and discrimination, having been at the sharp end of it.
Things started to change in the late 1980s. I don’t know how much this had to do with what was going on in schools but certainly the arrival of new wave comedians went a long way to making entertainment based on crude, insulting and vulgar jokes about race, religion etc. a thing of the past. Why did they make such a difference? Because they were original, talented and damned funny; they reached a hell of a lot of people.
Related posts:
Sign up to receive all new posts delivered daily to your inbox.