The Scottish/Irish diaspora feeds back into England too. Many of the Irish who were brought over as scab labour in 1926 stayed on, though in certain Durham villages bad feelings linger. An old friend of mine, for example, never dared tell her mother she'd converted to Roman Catholicism. These bad feelings aren't racial, or even cultural, rather they are political, for the best & worst of reasons. I once met an old Irish man who told me how he'd come over as a young man in 1926 and had been beaten up so badly he'd ended up in hospital; a delegation of miners came to see him, having raised enough money for his passage home, explaining their cause & presenting him with a copy of The Manifesto of the Communist Party!

The old Newcastle song A U Hinney Burd mentions the Castle Garth for tailors referring to the innumerable tailors who had their shops on the Castle Garth Stairs leading from the castle to the quayside, many of whom were Irish, and one of whom was my great-great-grandfather, newly arrived from Dublin. Strong Irish traditions on Tyneside - didn't John Doonan live out near the Felling? In the North-West of course, things are very Irish indeed, with marked Irish influences on both the culture and spirituality of the region, and as one small-time hotelier recently told me: there's more Scots living in Blackpool than there are in Edinburgh. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but at times one wonders why we bother having borders at all. I'm presently a member of the of IoNAJHA - the Islands of the North Atlantic Jew's harp Association. I like that a good deal; this is my home, The Islands of the North Atlantic!