Though Perry Curtis considers my article somewhat opaquely written, I really do not believe that he helps himself in striving for understanding. He chides me, for instance, for failing to list examples in my first paragraph of scholars who “have emphasized the fact and power of circumlocutions adopted by British cultural agencies to justify assumptions that the Irish were (or are) uncivilized.” But surely it should be possible for him to have the patience to read on two paragraphs where I do iterate three such instances (David Lloyd, Claire Wills, and Anne McClintock) in recapitulating the argument. More fundamentally, Curtis insists in reading into my article an assertion that within the period reviewed “the Irish could not possibly have been racialized by the British governing class because both peoples were white” (Curtis, p. 135). This is notwithstanding that I at no point make that argument; as Curtis himself notes, I reject the reduction of racism to chromatism and at numerous points suggest that concepts of racialization have been and can be fruitfully applied to historical analysis of British perceptions of Ireland. Curtis also accuses me of not paying attention to the sentiments of unionists such as Leopold Amery (p. 142) when I quote what I explicitly state to be an example of racialization in a letter by Leopold Amery (Peatling, pp. 128-29; Curtis ignores my analysis of its context). Yet Curtis still insists on suggesting that denial of racialization is, in fact, the subtext of my argument. He thus insists on reading a subtext opposed to what I actually say, thus refuting an argument that I nowhere advance. In offering this example of what he apparently has in mind by “scholarly” reading (p. 145), Curtis repeatedly misses the mark.

Instead, the issue really between us, as John Belchem identifies, is the question of “the distance … between cultural sources [of anti-Irish prejudice] and the political decision-making process” at key moments in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century periods under review (Belchem, p. 148). It is not my view that racialization, or anti-Irish prejudice, did not exist or had no political influence in those periods. In relation to the Irish famine, for instance, I suggest it may be of limited benefit to emphasize the influence of racialization on British government relief policy and British opinion toward Ireland (Peatling, p. 120). This is not to suggest that there was no such influence, merely that there were also other factors and that the role of this one factor may be exaggerated. While I criticize aspects of the recent work of Michael de Nie, it is legitimate to suggest that British government policy in the event of an equivalent humanitarian catastrophe in contemporary Britain may have been different and that the currency of racial ideologies may partly, but only partly, explain this difference. However, one should also take note of other recent research on the famine which may alter our understanding on this point.Footnote 1 On the larger question, while both Curtis and I feel that anti-Irish prejudice did have a political influence on British policy, at least at certain times, we adopt very different estimates of how significant it was, particularly in the late nineteenth century and beyond. Curtis argues, for instance, as I note, that “‘what really killed Home Rule in 1886 and 1894 was the Anglo-Saxon stereotype’” (Peatling, p. 123), that is negative stereotypes of Ireland linked to positive British self-perceptions. I engage in detail with this assertion and show that it is too simplistic, but Curtis ignores most of my arguments. My point is that to demonstrate the existence of prejudice, in whatever form, particularly if detached from political decision making, is no proof that prejudice had such a determining political power as Curtis claims for it. Logically, this has to be the case, as surely one must at least investigate the possibility that other cultural and political influences may have intruded, thus limiting the political consequences of prejudices. I argue that in this case such influences did, indeed, intrude significantly, and I particularly link such influences to consciousness of Irish “whiteness.” This consciousness did not occlude anti-Irish prejudice, but neither was it, as Curtis puts it, “irrelevant” (p. 143); it did exert significant influence in counteracting the political force of negative stereotyping. This is not to deny the racialization of the Irish but instead to emphasize the ultimate importance of the racialization of the Irish as white. Curtis not only assumes that no such significant countervailing influences existed but seems to believe that to cite examples of prejudice in high or low culture demonstrates that they were the central causes of political events. Surely, this is inadequate. I suggest that it is in offering an inadequate (if, as Curtis rightly states, “antithetical”; p. 140) understanding of political decision-making processes that a point of comparison can be made between his approach and that of Cooke and Vincent (like Curtis I rejected Cooke and Vincent's approach early in my career). Further, I suggest that Curtis's approach and errors have recently become rather more important than Cooke and Vincent’s, as a large body of more recent work concerned with anti-Irish prejudice (some of which Curtis notes) draws inspiration from Curtis's foundational work and therefore makes the same assumptions, failing to ask the same questions.

If racialized assumptions of Irish political incapacity (especially Irish nationalist political incapacity) were the critical influence on the Home Rule debates of 1886, why was the British political class not only willing a year earlier to enfranchise a large number of Irish nationalist voters but unable or unwilling to offer any considerable resistance to this move? If the same assumptions were so effective in the Edwardian period, why were so many British observers increasingly happy with comparisons pairing the Irish more with the peoples of self-governing white colonies than with nonwhite subject peoples of the British Empire usually given far more limited political rights (if not more brutal treatment)? If expressions of prejudice such as those of Amery, Lilias Bathurst, and Charles Bretherton were so politically determining in the Anglo-Irish war of 1920–21, why did most British observers ultimately consent to a treaty granting nationalist Ireland most of the features of dominion status? If anti-Irish prejudice continued to be so politically significant after the treaty of 1921, as both Curtis and R. M. Douglas suggest, why are they unable to instance any tangible political consequence of that prejudice into the 1920s and the 1930s? These are the questions that I ask and try to answer. My answer is that such negative racializations of the Irish were rarely politically determining on any of the significant developments in Anglo-Irish relations in this period; instead, racializations of the Irish as white became more crucial. Other answers may be possible. But Curtis does not engage with these questions and thus offers no other answers.

Curtis complains that my article is unoriginal, particularly suggesting that it is derivative of an article by Sheridan Gilley published in 1978, even though I repeatedly cite and criticize material published by scholars well after 1978. I would agree, however, that some points in my article have been made before. My attempt to draw Curtis into recognition that there were other important aspects of the unionist case against Home Rule besides anti-Irish prejudice is a point that was made even before 1978 by, for instance, Walter L. Arnstein.Footnote 2 Yet in so far as may be gauged from Curtis's reaction, as well as from much recent work, it is necessary to reiterate such points, since he and others still evince no willingness to recognize or respond to them. A similar point may be made about Curtis's discussion of Lord Salisbury's rhetoric during the Home Rule debate. Curtis's examination of Salisbury's “Hottentot” speech offers little advance on his arguments from 1968.Footnote 3 Curtis here fails to recognize the work of Andrew Gailey, itself now nearly twenty years old, which poses serious questions as to whether Unionists’ public rhetoric really represented the underlying influences on the Unionist government's policy in Ireland at this time.Footnote 4 I only briefly cited Gailey's work principally because I assumed that such points demonstrated in such well-acclaimed work were already recognized. Clearly, in Curtis's case, I was mistaken.

Both David Wilson and Curtis query my argument that the stress placed on anti-Irish prejudice as a politically determining influence on British attitudes to Ireland, especially within British unionism, is derivative of partisan pro–Home Rule arguments made at the time. (My point is evident, again, in Curtis's regret that he did not raid Erskine Childers's Home Rule treatise for an epigraph, and a simplistic one at that, for his own Anglo-Saxons and Celts, as well as in Curtis's renewed treading over the ground of the “Hottentot” speech.) Wilson argues that the fact that such an argument was made in political debate at the time is no necessary reason to reject it: one may be biased, but still accurate (p. 154). Of course, logically, Wilson's point is valid. But my point is that the interpretation is inaccurate in this case, since opposition to Home Rule was considerably more complicated than being underwritten by racist anti-Irish prejudices in the way Curtis suggests. Further, I suggest that cultural studies and cognate scholarly movements have in many cases taught us to be suspicious of discourses in scholarship which evince similarities with those of historical actors. It is just puzzling that writers within such disciplines have not aired relevant suspicions in the current case. Suspicion need not entail rejection, but it should certainly entail analysis. Detailed parallels between contemporary assertions and the later arguments of historians purporting to study the relevant periods comprise examples of reenacting a contemporary political position, a process which is surely different from a historian conducting research into or quoting contemporary records. Scholars reenact a contemporary position when they merely affirm such a position without either analyzing or (barely) acknowledging it. Quotations are useful precisely where they are both acknowledged and analyzed (which is what I do with Erskine Childers's book The Framework of Home Rule), and where this is not done one may question a scholar's research.

Curtis also misunderstands my points about Childers's book. Childers's American wife's questionable role in his conversion to Home Rule is irrelevant to my argument,which is concerned not with the source of what Childers said but with the British reaction to it.Footnote 5 Curtis may, in fact, be wrong to belittle the influence of Childers's book on British and Irish political debate.Footnote 6 But I do not mean to suggest that the publication converted considerable numbers of people to Home Rule, and the extent of the influence of the publication is also not critical to this part of my analysis—nor is the fact that Childers was not a leader of a British political party (Curtis, p. 142). What is critical is that common racialized understandings of British, Irish, and other peoples at the time were, as I put it, “cognate” to (not necessarily derivative of) Childers's clear comparisons between the Catholic or nationalist Irish and the “white (and occasionally genocidal) colonizers and settlers” in the self-governing colonies of the British Empire (Peatling, p. 132). Childers will have persuaded practically noone of the merits of Home Rule, but the reaction to his book is significant in showing that he was far nearer to the British and Irish political mainstream than the doctrinaire Morning Post position on Ireland espoused by Bretherton and Bathurst, on which Curtis and Douglas repeatedly place such disproportionate emphasis. More people felt with Childers that the nationalist or Catholic Irish, being comparable to white European ethnic groups, were deserving of political treatment distinctly different from that thought appropriate for most nonwhite subject peoples of the British and other empires at the time. This did not necessarily make Home Rule inevitable or mean that Ireland's whiteness predestined its people to political and cultural treatment very different from that accorded nonwhite subject peoples. This is a point that Belchem makes, taking it in a different direction. It did, however, mean that Ireland's whiteness—a form and not a negation of racialization—had at least become an important factor in the positioning of the Irish upon British imperial racial hierarchies and that there had emerged a widespread, although certainly not unanimous, recognition in Britain at the time that Ireland's whiteness gave Irishmen, and in some cases Irishwomen, entitlements to political rights.

Why then did whiteness play such a role in British perception of and political treatment of Ireland, including nationalist Ireland? If we mean to emphasize the contingency of processes of racialization (and, as Belchem realizes, I certainly mean to do so), this becomes a crucial question. Without attempting here to give a complete answer, I would suggest that there is one critical factor that Curtis, and much research that Curtis has influenced, has failed to acknowledge: that British perceptions of Ireland were informed by many contexts other than those of nationalist politics.

One dimension of this is flagged by Wilson (pp. 154-55), namely, the level of Protestant and Catholic Irish participation in the British imperial system as colonizers. Surely, it must have been hard at any time to maintain a view that the Irish at home merited a treatment as political inferiors analogous to that accorded nonwhite imperial subject peoples when the British purposefully coopted Irish individuals to work as superiors in administering that same imperial system. Of course, there were also nonwhite collaborators in the British Empire, but these were not exported to the same degree, and whiteness surely here provided a barrier reinforcing perceived differences. Wilson also correctly instances Liam Kennedy's identification of a “MOPE” complex in modern Irish culture as a scholarly analysis cognate to aspects of my argument, although I would suggest that the role of self-pity is also critical to many other contemporary forms of nationalism, including British nationalism.Footnote 7

A second dimension concerns which individuals, groups, or signifiers were the target of hostility in any given discourse. At least in intention, some such discourses may have been moved by hostility specifically to Irish nationalist politics rather than to Ireland or the Irish. This is again not to deny the existence of anti-Irish prejudice, nor to suggest that some such discourses may have had the effect (rather than intention) of stereotyping or victimizing Irish people as a whole. It suggests, however, that the picture is more complicated and that there may have been room within such discourses or formations for rather different responses or consequences. Representations intending to besmirch particular Irish nationalist leaders could coexist with other less negative representations of other symbolic or actual features of Irishness. To suppose that the fundamental element of such a representation is an adverse stereotyping of Ireland, as is commonly argued in the scholarship, involves the essentialist assumption that “Irish nationalism” (in certain forms) and “Ireland” are synonymous. Even where this may have been the effect of some such discourses, this is certainly not what many Victorian Britons would have assumed, at least before 1885, when the dominance of Parnellite nationalism over much of Ireland was still unclear. To collapse such distinctions may thus distort our understanding of anti-Irish prejudice in Victorian, and Edwardian, Britain and reduce our perception of factors limiting its political purchase.

This point further links to questions about the essentializing conception of “Ireland,” and other national categories, effective in recent scholarship of anti-Irish prejudice, as well as the political uses to which such conceptions are being put. Wilson correctly highlights limits to the scope for “cross-cultural solidarity” in United Irishmen's thought (p. 155). Luke Gibbons, and like-minded Irish academics, evade the force of such criticisms by making the political argument that, irrespective of the frequency of such instances of “cross-cultural solidarity,” it is desirable to emphasize the potential of such solidarity within past and present formations in Irish culture. I argue, on the other hand, that such scholarship sometimes may itself utilize crude discourses and practices relating to national categories and essentialist conceptions of national or racial communities. In other words, it supposes that essential characteristics of Irish culture can be defined or redefined. I fail to satisfy Wilson that such a process may have influenced policy making precisely because I argue that many of the dangers lie in the present and the future, not the past.Footnote 8 I believe Steve Garner posits this in noting the paradoxical and flawed nature of the notion of a specifically Irish antiracism: the idea of Irish antiracism involves an uncritical notion of what is Irish, as well possibly as of what is characteristic of other national communities.Footnote 9 I also suggest that such errors can provide new and other supports for racial ideologies. Hence my call for investigating “possibilities of progressive action that are not dependent on such essentialist conceptions” (Peatling, p. 122). Notwithstanding Curtis's preposterous suggestion (p. 145), this is not in order to be Anglocentric but rather to reject any sort of center, which is why, unlike Curtis, I think the errors of the British ruling class in matters beyond Ireland constitute a question of more than parenthetic importance.Footnote 10

To summarize: unlike Belchem and Wilson, Curtis has understood few of my points. His response is, in consequence, a missed opportunity to engage with my arguments and not the first time he and others have missed such an opportunity. My key criticism of his work is that evidence of the representation of the Irish as racially other, or of negative prejudice toward the Irish, is not evidence that such representations were politically influential in the way Curtis presupposes. Such evidence could conceivably be found, if Curtis, and a large number of subsequent scholars, were to look in appropriate places. But until they manage to engage seriously with criticisms such as I posit, they are not likely to do this.