By Charlie Hinds
“Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only got to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always”. [1]
Despite the defiance emanating out of every inch of that infamous statement from the Provisional IRA, made after it was announced that Magaret Thatcher and her cabinet survived the assassination attempt at Brighton’s Grand Hotel. The response from the public was assuming Patrick Magee’s finely tuned plan failed because of the “Paddy Factor”.
This mocking term emerged in the 1970s not as any core crucial component to the British state’s response to ‘The Troubles’ but rather a repeated piece of gallows humour from the security services – a meme that ended up becoming endemic within the security services. It is not a unique concept to presume that the enemy is so inferior that they are fundamentally incapable of waging war (consider the French attitude toward the Vietcong).[2] Unlike the French in Vietnam, there is no clear-cut conceptualisation of an ethnic distinction between those Brits born on the island of Great Britain, those born on the island of Ireland, Irish born on the island of Ireland, and Irish born in Great Britain. Though clunkily phrased, that’s partially the point, there isn’t a spectrum of Brit-Irish but for some reason that meme persists that those at one end of the spectrum were total idiots.
It isn’t even as though there wasn’t any evidence for competency, by 1984 a number of highly effective terror attacks often penetrating deep into the heart of the British state had occurred. Nail bombs in Hyde Park had killed 11 troopers of the household cavalry,[3] and front bench politicians had been assassinated in the House of Commons car park.[4] So, why did that narrative persist, beyond simply saying “racism”?
The first factor to consider is the state’s insistence on the monopoly on intentional violence. By insisting that, no matter how deadly or high profile an attack, they didn’t really have any impact on state authority, the attacks could be deemed illegitimate, just as gang violence doesn’t prove a threat to the state. As previously said this isn’t the exact link to the “Paddy Factor” meme but it lays the groundwork – that idea that we don’t treat the actions of terrorists as legitimate will always be read as “we don’t treat the actions of Irishmen as legitimate”, after all they were dealing with Irish terrorists.
The next factor is the centuries of racism that had existed in Great Britain towards anyone Irish, regardless of how high ranking a figure they may have been. Infamously signs reading ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ were common on boarding houses in England in the 1950s.[5] The commonality of “Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman” jokes, where the socially understood punchline is the stupidity of the Irishman. This was such a hegemonic attitude that even Karl Marx described Irish people fleeing the famine in Ireland who found work on Great Britain as ‘a swarm of locusts,’[6] and that was meant to be in their defence. Anecdotes of the treatment of family members with any accent from Ireland, really do begin to cement this idea that for many English people there was no nuance. Whilst this does partially take a consideration for the concept of ‘sprachnation’ (the nation being defined by language,[7] but in this case its accent), there is a missing component.
This is then when you have to bring in something curious that happened in Northern Ireland, and that’s the attempts to integrate themselves into English society whilst still maintaining traditional components of Ulster culture. Here you see things like Unionist families anglicising names, for example Siobhan being spelt Shivaun or Sean being spelt Shaun. An active effort has to be made to show to your neighbours what your political affiliation is, through the cultural and linguistic commitments you make.
Bringing all this together shows a simple maxim. British means competent, intelligent and civilised, Irish means, incompetent, stupid and savage. The normativity in “spelling how it sounds” guarantees this dichotomy. This is why there is a hesitancy to label Unionist paramilitaries as British terrorists, even though they used many of the same tactics as their Republican counterparts – the only difference is self-identification.
Ironically, despite presumptions of ‘The Troubles’ being defined by ethno-nationalist reinterpretations of religious sectarianism, the reality is that it is the exemplar for civic nationalism. The practice of belonging to a nation has become so important that by the very evidence of your successful completion of a task could signify your nationality.
Footnotes –
1 Rory Carrol, Killing Thatcher, (Mudlark, London: 2024), 228
2 Pablo de Orellana, The Road to Vietnam: America, France, Britain and the First the Vietnam War, (I.H. Taurus, London: 2020), 163
3 Carrol, Killing Thatcher, 132-133
4 Carrol, Killing Thatcher, 140-141
5 Katie Mellet, “No Blacks No Dogs No Irish : Times Readers Recall Encountering Notorious Signs in Britain” Irish Times 6 May 2024, Accessed 21 April 2025 https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/ 2024/05/06/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs-irish-times-readers-recall-encountering-notorious-signs-in-britain/
6 Karl Mark, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Progress Publishing, Moscow: ), 459
7 – Fatja Faulstich, “Die deutsche Sprachnation – Zur Entstehung kultureller Identität im deutschsprachigen Sprachnormierungsdiskurs des 18. Jahrhunderts” In Diskurslinguistik nach Foucault: Theorie und Gegenstände edited by Ingo H. Warnke, 247-272, (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2007), 247
Identity Hunters 