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 case.

“This was just banter, wasn’t it?”, English readers asked themselves. “Everyone loves the Irish. It was meant affectionately.”

Whether those exact words were said is speculation on my part. But it’s speculation based on experience.

I have worked in England for most of my adult life. I have worked in offices with supposedly well-educated and well-brought-up English men who mocked my accent, sometimes without thinking, and often with misplaced affection.

There are people I have known for years, often in a close personal capacity, who resolutely refuse to learn how to correctly pronounce my very common Irish name.

I was once asked to do background research on neighbourhoods around the peace walls, neighbourhoods I grew up in, which were casually described as “s***holes”.

People in England have also said things to me which are nakedly xenophobic, and appeared surprised at my horror.

Once, at a dinner, I was introduced to an elderly Englishman in a fedora whose first comment to me was a joke about how I must be a cleaner.

I’ve been here a long time, and I’ve noticed something strange about these interactions. They creep. They’re becoming more common, more regular, more accepted. Why is that?

It’s an interesting question, and a strange phenomenon, particularly because it’s occurring at a time when Ireland is supposedly having its biggest and most bombastic cultural moment.

There’s a “green wave” across music, film and literature. For a country of just seven million people – fewer than the population of London – we consistently punch above our weight, culturally speaking.

But as what we understand as “Irish culture” has become more popular, real Irish culture and the people who contribute to it have been flattened for the sake of mass-market appeal.

Without nuance or political depth, Irish people have become internationally synonymous with a kind of meaningless paddywhackery: splitting the G, Tayto crisps, Claddagh jewellery, reducing Irish international solidarity to “paddystinianism”, fancying Paul Mescal, travelling to Washington DC on St Patrick’s Day to shake JD Vance’s hand.

This is how the English understand Irish people today. No longer seen as a cultural bogeyman – most working-age Brits would struggle to remember The Troubles or the IRA’s bombing campaign of London – we’ve instead become a kind of living punchline.

Just happy to be here. Always up for the craic. Sure it’s all just in jest.

Say what you want, we’ll take it on the chin. Sure we’re all friends now anyway, aren’t we.

What’s remarkable about a lot of my experiences – bar the elderly man in the fedora - is that I genuinely don’t think the people knew or recognised they were saying or doing it in bad faith.

There are few things English people loathe more than the idea that they might somehow be being impolite.

They say and do these kinds of things not because they are seeking confrontation – they are socialised out of being plain-speaking in any way – but because they don’t stop to think how offensive those things are to others.

English culture doesn’t just encourage politeness over candidness, it also promotes an almost total blanket ignorance of Irish culture, Irish history, and England’s role therein.

English children do not learn about Ireland; the one million people who died during the potato famine are as absent from their curricula as the practice of head-hunting by British soldiers in Malaysia or the Boer War concentration camps.

They are perhaps not totally at fault then for aging into adults whose only understanding of their closest neighbour is restricted to spice bags and Cillian Murphy.

But nonetheless, £23,000 is little compensation for putting up with it.

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