"The discomfort with catholism which some, even progressive english people feel" says InOBU

Actually in my experience, you're more likely to get it among "progressive people". You'll get sneery and dismissive stuff about Catholics in papers like The Guardian that you'd never get about any other religion. I think Chesterton once said that the real religion of England was anti-Catholicism.

Maybe if I wasn't a Catholic I'd see it as a problem. But I am, and I don't. It's a hangover from something that was much more serious a few generations ago. I've never come up against any discrimination arising from it myself. As InOBU says, people occasionally feel a little nervous - "a slight discomfort".

Of course this overlaps with Irishness, and there's definitely been a fair amount of suspicion and even hostility towards Irish people these last 30 years or so -but that's not surprising in the circumstances, and there's been less than you might have thought. Most of the time it's outbalanced by other attitudes.