Maggie O’Farrell

A lot of Irish jokes where, of course, you know, always the Irish person is structured as being the stupid person.

And it ranged from that, which was relatively benign, to teachers who were taking the register at school who would look at my name and then they would say, oh, is your dad in the IRA?

Yeah.

You know, and this is to a small child.

Yeah, I mean, essentially you're saying, is your dad a terrorist?

And even when I was, you know, I was working in an office in London in the 90s and my dad would phone up and one of my colleagues would say, whenever your dad calls, I always think we're going to get a five minute warning.

And at that point, I would say, you know, first of all, my dad's from Dublin.

Second of all, he's not a terrorist.

He's an economics teacher.

And thirdly, that's really offensive.

You know, can you not see that that's not okay to say to me?

And then what was the response to that?

Oh, yeah, so touchy.

But, you know, I mean, my parents remember a time when they would go to Britain and there was, you know, the terrible signs up in cafes and B&Bs, you know, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs.

And I think things have improved.

I don't think these days I hear so many jokes now about terrorism.

But I don't think it's because necessarily people are less racist.

I think just unfortunately newer waves of immigrants are being targeted and bearing the brunt of that instead, unfortunately.

Yeah, that's not a good way to behave, is it?

I mean, it's never okay to be racist, is it?