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'The Wearing of the Green': The Irish Hit Manchester's Mean Streets By David Tereshchuk The Irish of the Diaspora did not all scatter to the far corners of the world. Many of them traveled a relatively short distance and made new homes in Britain -- even if that seems to surprise the author of "The Wearing of the Green". In the introduction to his sweeping and finely detailed 200-pager, Michael Herbert says it is a great paradox or irony that "on leaving their own land, Irish migrants ... took up residence in the hearts of the towns and cities of the very country whose imperialist policies ... had forced them to leave in the first place." It needn't appear an oddity. Not when we think of all the Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Caribbean islanders, Cypriots, and Africans who have in waves over the last 200 years made precisely that move from a poverty-stricken homeland to the streets of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Glasgow ... and usually to the meaner of those city streets. THE WEARING OF THE GREEN: A Political History of the Irish in Manchester By Michael Herbert 224 pp. Manchester: Irish in Britain Representation Group Available by mail from IBRG, PO Box 22790, London N22 8AE, United Kingdom. 12.95 UK Pounds, 13.95 Euros, $16.00 (U.S.) Manchester's streets certainly qualify as mean, as Herbert's portrayal emphasizes. I have my own vivid, grim memories as a young, impoverished Celtic immigrant to that northern English industrial center in the 1950s (in my case from the Scottish border country), and they could hardly be better expressed than by the Irish author William Cooke Taylor, whom Herbert quotes tellingly from the 1840s: "I well remember the effect produced on me by my earliest view of Manchester, when I looked upon the town for the first time ... and saw the forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke, forming an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the whole place." It seems little had changed for Manchester's environment until the very last years of the twentieth century. And little changed for its Irish immigrant community, either. They were always among the poorest, and -- until they better asserted themselves -- always among the most poorly treated. ... a forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke -- Irish writer William Cooke Taylor, writing about Manchester But there's little self-pity in this book. It's a story of action -- as you might expect from a local scholar who is also a trustee of the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester's close neighboring city, Salford. Herbert assiduously pictures the activities of the Manchester Irish (linked inextricably as he sees them with broad radical movements like Chartism, trades unionism and women's suffrage) against the background of different phases in Ireland's own national struggle. For instance, while the French Revolution's original aims inspired Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen to incorporate themselves in Belfast in October 1791 (and a month later in Dublin), Manchester also had its own chapter, meeting in a public house called "Liberty Hall." Herbert tells us the Manchester group was a spearhead for many other chapters that formed in northern England, and it served as a revolutionary conduit between Belfast, London and Paris, to be maintained in the face of determined British government effort to infiltrate the movement with its spies. It is good to be reminded, too, that the progressive impulse of the time -- applauded so passionately by that most English of poets, Wordsworth -- was widely shared throughout the British Isles. There were United Englishmen and United Scotsmen sallying forth against oppression, after all. (Though with the superiority of hindsight, we might today remark on the absence of women in these heroic formulations.) There's little self-pity in this book. It's a story of action, including the local Irish support for Ireland's national struggle. Occasionally, Herbert is able to put Manchester squarely in the foreground of the Irish struggle. In the 1860s, there was the prosecution of the Irishmen known as the "Manchester Martyrs" for their part in the "Manchester Rescue," a venture that resulted in the killing (murder, the British authorities called it) of a policeman. The "Rescue" was that of two Irish-Americans, Colonel Thomas Kelly and Captain Timothy Deasy (both recent veterans of America's Civil War) who were on a mission for the Fenian movement to Manchester but were captured and imprisoned in the city's Bellevue jail. Once freed, they were smuggled back to America, but three of the men accused of springing them felt the full weight of British "justice" and of establishment opinion. Herbert tells us that the Cabinet Minister in charge of security wrote in his diary: "This at Manchester! What are we coming to? ... England shall never endure that such an event should happen unpunished." Working Class Movement Library Election leaflet for Neil Boyle, Irish Civil Rights Association candidate for Manchester's impoverished Moss Side, for the General Election, October 1974. Punishment came one winter's daybreak. Amid a frenzy of anti-Irish sentiment (England's Queen, the unamused Victoria herself, is quoted saying at this time that the Irish "are really shocking, abominable people, not like any other civilized nation"), the three "martyrs" -- William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O'Brien -- were hanged publicly November 23, 1867. Manchester's role in the struggle is traced further, including the so-called "skirmishing" bomb attacks by the Fenians in the 1880s -- one of which apparently targeted the armory of a British army barracks in Salford, though the only casualties were a civilian woman and child. The 20th-century IRA bombing campaigns in Britain (1920-21, 1939-40, and 1973-1996), for which the 1880s skirmishes are described by Herbert as "a template," are fully recounted -- with Manchester's place in each campaign neatly delineated. The authorities' broad and repressive response, too, which the Irish community in Britain as a whole had to suffer during all of those campaigns, along with a vicious street-level backlash against ordinary Irish people, is fully documented. The most dramatic episode in the bombing campaigns was perhaps the massive explosion that ripped the heart from Manchester's city center at a time -- horribly and sadly -- when the complex and painstaking peace process for Northern Ireland was already under way, though haltingly at that point. It was June 1996, and the ceasefire that had been maintained for 18 months came under strain, with political pressure mounting on the IRA to disarm -- or "decommission," in the favored euphemism of the negotiating parties. The IRA called off the ceasefire, impatient with British government insistence that it disarm despite what the IRA felt were few political reforms in exchange, and set off a massive bomb at Canary Wharf in London, and then the Manchester bomb. MANCHESTER PEOPLE STILL TALK OF "THE BOMB" AS A MILESTONE IN THE CITY'S HISTORY. In the words of Manchester's Council Leader: "It was extremely bad luck that Manchester suffered this enormous destruction. It was extremely good luck we suffered no loss of life." The center has been completely reconstructed in the years that followed, but Manchester people still talk of "The Bomb" as a milestone in the city's history. This book treats it in fairly short order, as a step on the way to the epoch-making Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Some carping criticism must be made about the book's production. For those who don't know Manchester, it is frustrating to see very precise place-name references blithely given so often, and yet to have no maps for visual guidance. You would have to know Manchester well to know what's meant by "Irishtown" -- the modern-day Manchester district of Collyhurst. (And it would have been good to prevent bewilderment among non-Manchester people about one particular place name: "Boggart Hole Clough". No explanation is given; I'm glad my Manchester youth enables me to recognize it as a local park.) Proofreading is in general shoddy and sometimes shockingly bad. This diminishes the work of design and typesetting -- and sadly so, for this was done in Manchester itself. To mix up "county" with "country" is perhaps understandable, but the book's epidemic of hyphenation is harder to take, when it gives us not only the unnecessary "there-after" and "un-official," but also the barely comprehensible "allow-ed" -- and even at one point "lang-uage." But all carping aside, this survey amounts to a valuable addition to the recorded history of the world's army of Irish exiles, both far-flung and near to home. UN media adviser David Tereshchuk, a New York-based TV news and documentary producer, is a WGT consultant and contributing editor. For Additional Information: Irish in Britain Representation Group James Connolly on "The Manchester Martyrs" (Workers' Republic, November 20, 1915) History of Manchester's 'Irish Town', from Pride of Manchester

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