There has been a kind of institutional contempt among elements of the "Brits" for centuries against the Irish. People like Thomas Carlile put their names to disgraceful essays along such lines.

As Kendall says, it was largely driven by economic concerns, or if I could be more specific, by mass ignorance of the economic realities - ignorance that was readily and easily exploited by a few Brits with political, vested interests.

It is comparable with the racism that has flourished in Britain, America, many other countries, and now Ireland itself. The reason that such selfish attitudes were slower to catch on in Ireland than in Britain or the USA has nothing to do with any kind of Irish moral superiority. It is simply that until recently the ignorant in Ireland saw no risk of being inundated by relatively more disadvanted people against whom they could discriminate, and over whom they could feel themselves to be superior.

All of this miasma of ill-will, from wherever it originates, and wherever it is directed, owes nothing to nationality and everything to the least pleasing aspects of human nature.

To Ard's post, where he speculates about how the Provo campaign may have affected attitudes to the Irish in Britain, I would just add that I know Irish nationalists who lived in Birmingham (as I did) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where in 1974 the IRA accomplished what was then the biggest mass murder in British history. Any hostility they encountered was more than offset by the concern of others to counteract such prejudice. No doubt there were cases of school bullying, though I didn't hear of it. That cannot be defended, but then schoolkids have an almost unfathomable capacity to torment peers for even the most trivial of reasons - all equally beyond justification.