We must distinguish the Irish from Irish terrorism

Well, here we go again: another sectarian terrorist attack, another spate of nativist prejudice flaring up across the national discourse. As a small group of extremist terrorists once more encourage the misrepresentation of a diverse and peaceful group, the point must once more be made loudly and clearly: the Irish are not all terrorists.

The attack I’m referring to is, of course, the deadly bomb attack against a police officer carried out by the so-called “Real IRA” in Northern Ireland earlier this month. Now, I understand why much of the American public must fear and distrust the Irish after the events of the past few decades: it is true that for many years now small groups of Irish terrorists have been engaged in seemingly senseless violence, targeting soldiers and civilians alike with guns and explosives for purely ideological reasons. Examples such as the Omagh bombing in 1998 which killed 29 people in County Tyrone, the 2001 Ealing bombing that happened just a few minutes from my high school or the Brighton hotel bombing that almost killed Margaret Thatcher have built up a strong impression in the mind of your average American that the typical Irishman is violent, fanatical and impossible to negotiate with.

I want to emphasize that this simply is not so. There are around six million people living on the island of Ireland—and only 300 or so active members of the Real Irish Republican Army or “Real IRA.” The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Irish people are peace-loving, friendly people no different from you or me. Yes, we hear of bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland at least every month—but this violence is being conducted by the minority, typically with the victims themselves being Irish. Yet every time one tiny terrorist faction carries out another anti-Protestant attack members of the Irish community find themselves called upon over and over again to protest the innocence of the Irish as a group.

Well as the child of both a British and an Irish citizen I want to say that I know for a fact that Irish people are not terrorists and that being Irish is compatible with Western values. Irish Catholicism, I insist, is a religion of peace—even if some of its most visible adherents seem to indicate otherwise. They, I protest, are not true Catholics.

With the vanishingly small proportion of Irish people that are terrorists in mind, we must question the validity of some of the things right-wing politicians have been proposing recently. Is it sensible to ban Irish people from coming to the U.S.? Does it make sense to force all Irish people and their children in the U.S. to carry ID cards when so few of them pose a risk? In the same vein, is it really productive to further alienate the Irish community by patrolling their neighbourhoods looking out for radicalisation? I would argue this is a massive overreaction and risks enflaming intercommunal relations by accusing innocent people of-

Wait, what was that? Sorry, I can’t hear you—can you speak louder? What? They…they don’t say that about the Irish? Really? The average American doesn’t think every Irish person is a terrorist? I’m not gonna lie, that’s kind of surprising. Well, you know, I had kind of assumed since you all go so crazy over the whole Islamic terrorism thing that you would be terrified of Irish people and propose the same restrictions for them as for Muslims. Why? Well we’re way more terrorist-y than Muslims! Okay, look at it like this: there’ve been around 10,000 members of the IRA since the 1960s, most of whom are presumably still alive. That means that about 0.17 percent of the Irish population were active IRA members, at least in its heyday. Now compare that with Islamic terrorism. If we take the most generous estimates for ISIS’ numbers (250,000 people according to a Kurdish estimate) that still only represents 0.015% of the total 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. You know, I get that there are more of them than there are us, but we’re proportionally more than 10 times as terrorist-y as the Muslims! Does that mean nothing to you people?

So, okay, I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. Americans really haven’t developed any terroristic stereotypes of Irish and people of Irish descent? There’re no threats to strip away our civil rights, no intentions to crack down on our communities in an ineffectual and counter-productive bid to suppress the few of us who might support terrorism? Because you know that there really are Irish-Americans who support or have supported terrorism, right? As Ann Applebaum at the Washington Post notes, American donations were once the main source of funding for the IRA’s terrorist activity. Plenty of Irish-Americans used to regularly give donations to the IRA with the go-ahead of the local police and even politicians. Can you imagine what would happen if people found out everyday Muslim-Americans were donating money to ISIS? And yet the only thing we have a reputation for is alcohol abuse!

Well, I don’t know. I guess there must just be some unknowable reason that Muslims get a reputation for all being violent terrorists and the Irish don’t.