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41 Prob. J. 2 (1994)

handle is hein.journals/probj41 and id is 1 raw text is: The Invisible Minority: Irish Offenders and the English Criminal Justice System Because of the deep historical and structural inequalities that they face in Britain, including their high rates of admission in psychiatric institutions, Irish people are likely to be over-represented in criminal statistics. Patrick Murphy, probation officer in Nottingham and Chair of the Nottingham Irish Studies Group, reviews the pattern of discrimination arising from traditional British prejudice and the added pressures of the Troubles in the North of Ireland and reports early, tentative research findings which demonstrate discriminatory sentencing patterns. He concludes that our current anti- discriminatory policies and procedures are inherently biased against Irish people who are 'neither foreign or British'. he Irish constitute the largest single ethnic minority in Britain: 830,000 at the 1991 census. If the children of these first-generation immigrants are taken into ac- count, the figure is closer to 4 million. And yet this group is probably one of the least visible of Britain's minority communities. The Irish were the first migrants to come to Britain in any numbers yet, despite this long tradition and the obvious advantages in this culture of being white, English speaking and European, they still suffer real disadvantage and discrimination. Nevertheless, their plight is constantly ignored by welfare agencies, in- cluding the Probation Service. The Irish are often accused of being obsessed with history but, without an understanding of Ireland's relationship to Britain, it is impossible to understand the problems that contemporary Irish im- migrants and their children face. In the Americas, Australia and in almost every other country in which they have settled, the Irish have fared as well, and in many cases better than other immigrant groups and have achieved parity with the general population within a generation or so. Yet in Britain, despite their obvious advantages, the Irish have failed to achieve an equal position in 2