THERE has never been a better time to be an Irish person in England.

Gone are the days of signs in London guest house windows reading ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’.

Discrimination has disappeared, and in its place a holistic welcome from our friends to the east.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Of course it does. It’s a fantasy.

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Last week a woman working in Leeds was awarded more than £23,000 by an employment tribunal who found she’d been racially harassed.

Bernadette Hayes is Irish. Her boss ridiculed her and imitated her accent, saying the word “potato” over and over again.

He made comments about her heritage that Hayes was meant to accept as humour. It totally eroded her self-esteem and self-respect, she said.

The harassment continued outside the office. Hayes’s boss would send her pictures of potatoes on WhatsApp, and make jokes about her lusting after Irish Travellers who lived near their office.

That this is stupid behaviour is evident. That it was evidently bullying too did not, unbelievably, stop Hayes later being dismissed from the company herself.

Her experience made headlines across England last week, and most people seemed fairly perplexed by the........

© The Irish News