I keep thinking about one gig I went to where you would have had no clue you were in England once the doors shut. An Irish rapper was performing at a venue decked out in Irish tricolours and Palestinian flags. Half the accents around me were Irish.
At one point, the rapper asked the crowd for a Union Jack flag on which to urinate, to raucous applause. I found myself wondering how comfortable an English person would have felt in that room, and then amazed I could be asking myself such a question in the middle of England’s capital city.
I left thinking how much what it means to be Irish in London right now has changed.
It’s not long since being Irish in Britain was unfashionable; we were dismissed as provincial or backward, or far worse. In some parts, we still are.
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London is a city where Irishness gets shouted out, rather than smoothed over
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I felt a version of that studying at Oxford, where being Irish was the nail that stuck out and risked getting hammered down – if you were ever to divulge your true feelings about, say, Margaret Thatcher.
London has turned out to be the opposite: a city where Irishness gets shouted out, rather than smoothed over.
No single image captures the shift better than a certain product does – Guinness. The drink spent decades as shorthand for a certain kind of Irish cliche: the flat-capped labourer, the rugger crowd, the pensioner at the end of the bar.
I used to make non-Irish people taste it when I was a teenager, and they would screw up their faces, asking how anyone could drink that. But things have changed. Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson put Guinness in pearls on a sweatshirt in 2024, and Instagram influencers have made a trend out of “splitting the G”.
Now those same people swallow Guinness with a smile and tell me how smooth stout is. It is the in-drink for anyone in London chasing a trend.
Guinness is a small example of a larger inversion, however. Irish culture is genuinely in fashion. In part, the reputation of the Irish has been earned through their solidarity with Palestinians and other oppressed peoples.
As a culture journalist in London, I have heard this shift in almost every interview I have done with Irish acts, from Sprints to Gurriers to Maverick Sabre and Curtisy. The conversation always finds its way back to Irishness, and their confidence in their own identity.
But in London, this confidence has an edge. I am not sure it is purely about pride. Joy Crookes, who is south London-born to an Irish father and a Bangladeshi mother, told me how her father had given her no choice but to learn trad music and Irish dancing. Irish music and culture was there to counteract erasure, she said.
That word, erasure, is key. The particular anxiety of being Irish in London is the proximity of British identity. London is an international city, a melting pot, but the British capital is still the British capital.
For Irish people, there might be a nagging fear that if you are not paying attention, you might be assimilated; mistaken for British, or worse, not minding whether you are. In London, Irish people become unlikely friends with other Irish, partly because they need each other to remember who they are.
People are reaching for Irish when they live in a city where nobody speaks it. This suggests something else: that the act of learning it is what matters
At that same rapper’s gig, the crowd seemed to sing his bars back to him a little louder than was strictly necessary, just to show they were in the know.
And then there is the Irish language, with waiting lists and sell-outs of courses in Irish in London. I attended a beginners’ session run by the Irish language collective Croí na Gaeilge, which filled the basement of a pub with people in their 20s. Many were prompted to learn by Kneecap and the renewed coolness of the tongue.
You might think that movement shows how much Irish people value their own language. But people are reaching for Irish when they live in a city where nobody speaks it. This suggests something else: that the act of learning it is what matters. It is a way to set yourself apart in a city that would not otherwise notice you blending in.
Some of what looks like Irish pride is, if you look at it carefully, an attempt to drown out insecurity. Shouting out how proud you are is a loud insistence on not being at home in a city that is very good at making everyone, eventually, feel at home.
Hugo Harvey is a writer and presenter from Cork who has lived across France and the UK.
