Brian Hanley
speaker
1,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 16 Sep
Brian Hanley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It was believed that the better Irish, those who wanted to get on, had travelled from Liverpool to the United States, but in contrast, those who travelled from Ireland intending to go to America, but never quite managing it, had concentrated in Liverpool themselves and been quite content there.
The racist commentator Joseph Bannister suggested that Liverpool was for many years employed as a dumping ground for the Irish Aborigines, whom the United States or our own colonies refused to accept.
Swarms not only of paupers and jailbirds from Sinn Fenland are unloaded there.
But also young pregnant unmarried women.
As a result, it is the most Irish, slummy, Romish, criminal, and vicious city in England.
Now Bannister wrote that around 1920.
when the Irish struggle was in full flight.
And it reflected a sense of Liverpool.
As alien, as foreign, as Catholic, and as Irish.
But it wasn't just conservative or nativist commentators who lamented the poverty of the Irish in Liverpool.
Despite their poverty, Irish workers in Liverpool proved quite resistant to labour politics initially.
Socialists lamented how the Irish in the city seemed to be content with their poverty and in fact align themselves with Irish nationalists rather than with socialists or Labour politicians.
One writer in the Liverpool Forward, a socialist newspaper, wrote about spending a day in the slums.
And what appalled him most was not the open ash bits, not the endless gin shops, not the beautiful and costly Roman Catholic churches, not the stuffed and broken windows, nor the stinking refuse in the gutters, but the grave content amongst the people who are living their lives without knowing what life is.
This of course could lead to people patronising the Irish, believing that Catholicism was dragging them backwards, and ignoring the other factors in the city's politics, which meant that Irish Catholics were always going to stick together.
The fact was that Liverpool's politics were divided sharply along religious lines.
In the early nineteen hundred the city contained a strong orange tendency, unmatched anywhere in Britain, even in Glasgow.
Orangeism was part of Liverpool's civic culture.
Orange Bent contributed much to the electoral dominance of conservatism in Liverpool.
The fact was that Liverpool had a Conservative Council, and for decades the nickname of the city was Torytown.
Showing 521–540 of 1,140 · page 27 of 57
← Previous
Next →