society

As the green hats and Guinness come out, social psychologist Dr Marc Scully  ponders the mixed feelings aroused by St Patrick's Day...

I was in a large card shop recently, when an advertisement was played over the in-store tannoy. “St Patrick’s Day is a great occasion to celebrate with family and friends” it said, “Why not show your family and friends you remember them this March 17th by sending them a card from our St. Patrick’s Day range?” Notably, for what is ostensibly the feast day set aside to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, no mention of either religion, or Irishness was made. It seems the day is now sufficiently established as a totem of green in mid-March that any religious or national associations are now largely irrelevant to celebrating it.

At the same time, this week’s Irish Post (the self-styled “voice of the Irish community in Britain”) contains a guide to “St. Patrick’s Day festivities near you” underlining the continued importance of the day as an Irish community event. However, Irish people are no longer the sole, or even the primary audience, for such festivities. In cities across the country, St. Patrick’s Day parades and festivals are currently being advertised as a kind of Irish-tinged carnival in which anyone can participate, regardless of their cultural background. 

These multiple identities of St. Patrick’s Day – commercial opportunity, Irish national holiday, religious feast, community festival, multicultural urban carnival – reflect the multifaceted nature of Irish identity abroad. In my recent PhD research on this topic (available on Open Research Online ), I was interested in how St. Patrick’s Day represented a form of public Irishness in England, as well as how Irish people used the day in talking about their own Irish identities.  

For many of those I spoke to, the meanings they associated with St. Patrick’s Day were wrapped up in the collective history of the Irish in England. Many spoke of the large community celebrations of the 1950s and 60s, before these were ‘driven underground’ by general hostility towards public displays of Irishness in the wake of the IRA bombings of English cities in the early 1970s. Birmingham was particularly badly affected, with the large St. Patrick’s Day parade in the city being suspended between 1974 and 1996. This is remembered as a traumatic period, and the reinstatement of the parade (with the full backing of the city council) has come to symbolise a form of reconciliation between the city and its Irish population, and a re-emergence of the Irish in the public space of the city. Similarly in London, the revival of the parade in the city centre has been a public project closely associated with the Mayor’s office, with both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson taking a prominent role in recent years.

However, if ownership of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in English cities has passed from the Irish community to the public at large, does this mean the promotion of a more stereotypical form of Irishness, as this is what the new audience for the parades will expect? While one person’s paddywhackery is another’s expression of traditional culture, many worry about the damage done to the image of the Irish in England by caricatured and ‘inauthentic’ portrayals of Irishness. For example, one of my participants criticised the London parade for representing a “kind of globalised Irish™ experience” which ignored the subtler aspects of Irish culture. This point of view, which was echoed by others, expresses a fear that St. Patrick’s Day as it is currently celebrated in England leads to aspects of Irishness such as the Irish language, sport, and the literary and musical traditions of the country being overwhelmed by a raucous ginger-wigged, green foam-hatted celebration of Guinness consumption. The perceived danger here is that this collective stereotyping might have knock-on effects for individual Irish people in their everyday lives. 

While this characterisation may be a little unfair, the contrary argument is that the enthusiasm of English and other non-Irish people for participating in the festivities represents such a positive turn-around from the anti-Irish sentiment prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, that popularity and inclusivity should supersede any concerns about ‘authenticity’. In other words, the important thing is that the space is there for Irishness to be publicly celebrated, and the type of Irishness advertised is not particularly the priority.  

The broad pattern, then, was that those who had had personal experience of anti-Irish discrimination in England tended to draw on this experience to argue for the importance of the popularity of St. Patrick’s Day as an inclusive celebration. Meanwhile, those who had migrated more recently and did not share this collective memory, were more likely to question the authenticity of the festivities as being insufficiently representative of modern Ireland. The answer to the question “whose day is it anyway?” would therefore appear to depend on whether you see ‘authentic’ Irishness as residing in Ireland, or among your friends and family in the Irish community in England. As the numbers of this community swell weekly with a new wave of Irish migrants, it will be interesting to see whether this shapes how St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in England in future years.

Marc Scully, 17 March 2011

Useful links 

• Marc's PhD on Irish identity in England 
• Marc's Twitter page 

Image:Thinkstock

There have been 333 deaths in custody since 1998: so far there has only been one conviction.

The death of 14-year-old Adam Rickwood in 2004 was just one of 333 deaths in custody identified by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in a research study published at the end of 2010. The death toll covered 11 years and included those who had died in, or following, police custody.

Adam’s mother, Carol Pounder, called for staff who restrained him hours before his death to be prosecuted. She did so following the inquest verdict in January 2011 which concluded that ‘unlawful force’ had contributed to Adam’s death. Adam, from Burnley, died at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in County Durham.  He remains the youngest person to die in UK custody.

But as the IPCC study discovered, though prosecutions were recommended against 13 officers in those 333 deaths, no prosecutions have so far resulted in a guilty verdict. In only one of the cases investigated by the IPCC was anyone found guilty of misconduct: in that case a civilian member of police staff was sentenced to 6 months in prison.

The IPCC concluded that even where there was ‘relatively strong evidence of misconduct or neglect’, prosecutions were rare, and where they occurred, juries appeared unwilling to convict. The IPPC chair commented last December ‘it is clear to us there is some real difficulty in this area.’

Eighty-seven of the 333 deaths followed interventions to restrain victims, the majority involving methods where the victim was physically held down by officers. Something similar happened in Adam’s case. His inquest found that this treatment contributed to his later suicide.

The statistics since 1998 – when 49 people died in UK custody – show that such incidents are declining year on year. Seventeen people died in UK custody in 2009-10.

Inquest, the independent organisation seeking reform into contentious deaths believe that the IPCC study ‘points to alarming failures in the care of vulnerable detainees suffering from mental health, drug and alcohol problems, many of whom should have been diverted from police custody'.

The IPCC found that nearly three-quarters of the 333 deaths were related to drug and alcohol issues, but that many of these people should have been taken to alternative facilities. In Scotland, for example, ‘drunk tanks’ have been created and found to be relatively safer places compared to police cells.

The IPCC also highlighted procedural inconsistencies. For example, less than a half of detainees identified for risk assessments were actually assessed by the police.  IThe PCC also found custody officers lacked any basic first aid training, so if something went wrong, they were inappropriately equipped to act.

The findings of the IPCC point to a familiar malaise in custody provision where the medical and mental ill health needs of a large number of arrested people had not been satisfactorily addressed. While the study did identify police and custodial failings, similar perhaps to the case involving Adam Rickwood, the most prominent finding from the study was the call by the IPCC to review whether custody is the best place for a large number of people dealt with by the police. It will be interesting to monitor the response to Adam’s mother's call for accountability, but history suggests the law, so far, may not be on her side.
 

Useful links

• Deaths in police custody study
  
• Inquest

Whether a celebrity or not, late pregnancy loss is a very public bereavement as women are left bereft of both bump and baby. Sam Murphy, from the OU’s Faculty of Social Health Care, reflects following Amanda Holden’s sad news…


The news at the weekend that Amanda Holden had suffered a stillbirth was particularly poignant as she had only just announced that she was pregnant a few weeks ago. Press reports have suggested that she delayed this announcement until she was six months pregnant due to her miscarriage last year – she was unwilling to risk going through such a loss publicly.

Stillbirth is defined as pregnancy loss after 24 weeks’ gestation and, by its very nature, is a very public loss. Judging by the responses to the Daily Mail story, 808 at the last count, the actor and her husband have much public sympathy and this might, of course, be a comfort to them. One commentator was worried that they might think it was their own fault even though everybody would say they were not to blame.  Or would they? 

The comments on Amanda Holden’s loss give us the opportunity to have an insight into people’s ideas about mothers. Such ideas are what we might call normative, that is, they are expressing codes of behaviour that mothers should adhere to and ideas about who should be a mother. For example, several people commented on the actress’s age – she is 39 – and suggested that if you had a baby at this age you needed to understand that there were risks. Other bloggers expressed sympathy for the actress by saying how unfair it was that 12-year-olds and teenagers have babies. From this we might deduce that the ideal age is somewhere between the two – indeed, one person used his post to exhort women in their 20s and early 30s  to have their babies now rather than put their career first. 

And speaking of her career, another theme was work. Having had a miscarriage, one woman suggested that she should have rested throughout the pregnancy. While we are not privy to the medical advice that Ms Holden received, if every woman in the country rested in the pregnancy after a miscarriage then I would venture to suggest that Britain would grind to a halt. Moreover, while sympathetic, one reader put the pregnancy loss down to the wearing of Spanx, suggesting that you don’t know what damage they do and, therefore, by extension vanity was the real cause. Another suggested that the recent spate of celebrity pregnancy loss was due to the expectant mothers not having enough fat on them.

Ms Holden is not the first celebrity to receive such negative comments, in an article about Lily Allen’s loss one reader told her that she shouldn’t have been prancing around on stage but instead should have been doing ‘simple chores at home’. Such comments also say much about how some people perceive the role of women in society.

When it comes to the actress’s experience of loss, one commentator suggested that actually at seven months, with the bump only just showing, she won’t feel it as much as other women who lose a baby and that she “should soon be out and about again”.  Previous researchers have noted, however, that grief following loss in not necessarily about the length of pregnancy but the commitment the parents have to the unborn child. 

One interesting point to finish on is that both Amanda Holden and Lily Allen were criticised for ‘attention-seeking’. While researching parental experiences of stillbirth, many women recounted to me how utterly exposed they felt they had been by the loss – they would tell how people would stare at them and cross the road to avoid them – whether a celebrity or not, late pregnancy loss is a very public bereavement as women are left bereft of both bump and baby.