For a group of people normally so hypersensitive, the Irish blogging community were remarkably sanguine about this revelation. This is perhaps because, being predominantly a left-wing constituency, they were content to adopt the mantra of former Canadian Prime minister Pierre Trudeau when he was attacked by Richard Nixon, “I’ve been called worse things by better people.”

However, this archaic blast of 1980s style anti-Irishness sparked the question, is anti-Irish sentiment a problem in Britain anymore?

The most iconic images of anti-Irishness in British culture down the years are Punch magazine’s portrayal of a “creature manifestly between the gorilla and the negro” that was to be found hauling a “hod of bricks” up ladders in British cities and, in the twentieth century, boarding houses advising that “No blacks, no Dogs and No Irish” need bother coming in looking for accommodation.

“Most of the folk memory surrounding these signs comes from the 1950s,” says UCD historian Brian Hanley. “There is debate about whether they appeared but so many people claimed to have seen them. There were no race-relations acts in Britain at that time so it’s perfectly plausible.”

Hanley says popular anti-Catholicism accounts for much of the anti-Irishness in Britain throughout history.

“We see a lot of anti-Catholicism in Britain in the nineteenth century particularly in places where there are concentrations of Irish people. Liverpool and Glasgow are the two most sectarian cities in Britain.”

The IRA, or their usage in popular culture, remains a large factor in residual anti-Irish feeling in Britain.

During the 1970s, in particular, the British police had a somewhat scattergun approach to rounding up IRA suspects. Comically unlikely members of the Irish community were plucked out and spent years languishing in jail. That Paddy and Annie Maguire of the Maguire Seven were, according to the emigrant Irish News, members of the Paddington Conservative Association, did not prevent them from spending fourteen years in prison over the Guildford and Woolwich bombings.

Last year, when the James Larkin Society in Liverpool held a march in honour of the legendary trade union leader, activists from the BNP, never a group lauded for their especially fine grasp of the ideological subtleties of Irish politics, held a sit-in, blocking the march and chanting “IRA, off our streets!”

And when an intrepid Panorama reporter chose to plant himself at the heart of some of the most violent scenes imaginable by opting to cover the English football fans at Euro 2000, he found some odd instances of excessive pre-occupation with the IRA and its doings. In between lobbing deck chairs across town squares at opposing fans and dodging tear gas rounds, the cluster of fans secretly filmed by the BBC repeatedly chanted “Fuck the IRA!” in the direction of the bemused Belgian riot police.

However, far-right groups and football hooligans (two groups among whom there is a high degree of overlap) can hardly be said to be representative of the English people.

Historian, commentator, London resident and long-time critic of Irish nationalism Ruth Dudley Edwards brushes aside any idea that anti-Irishness is a problem in Britain today.

“I have never encountered it but vested interests like the left, disgruntled losers and the discrimination industry have encouraged the idea that it’s there… I don’t think it’s a problem at all.”

And, even during the worst of the Troubles, Brian Hanley asserts that there was “nothing approaching pogroms of Irishpeople in Britain.”

Among the broad mass of English people, particularly since the Troubles melted away, there appears to be an instinctive fondness for the Irish combined with a blessed lack of knowledge of anything to do with its history. Scottish nationalists, such as writer Michael Fry, have highlighted the benign current relationship between the Irish and the English while alluding to “the sour, deteriorating relationship between England and Scotland.” The Irish accent remains a massive hit in nightclubs and Irish stand-up comics find it embarrassingly easy to get a laugh in London.

English comedian David Mitchell expressed the fervent hope that Afghanistan would go the same way saying that in twenty years that country might well be known for “its genial stand-ups and its chains of gastro-pubs.”

Top 5 Most Anti-Irish People of all-time

5. Julie Burchill (Columnist)

Over a long career as a columnist, Burchill has proven herself incapable of referencing Ireland and/or the Irish without also referring to Eamon De Valera, German ambassadors and messages of condolence. In 2002, outraged at the suggestion that English people should cheer on Ireland at the World Cup in Japan, she labelled the tricolour the ‘Hitler-licking, altar-boy molesting, abortion-banning Irish tricolour.’

4. Michael Burleigh (Historian)

In his book ‘Sacred Causes’, historian Michael Burleigh included a chapter on the Northern Ireland conflict, which opened with a five page rant about the Irish, specifically the Catholic Irish. He took a ferocious pop at modern Irishculture, sneering at the lingering “flutey-voiced sentimentality” that naïve Americans associated with the country, oblivious to the fact that it had recently become, in Burleigh’s far-from-flattering estimation, “a vulgarised version of Essex.” He took a dim view of the fabled Irish literary success, which consisted of ‘various provincial cliques’ elevated and puffed up by their ‘metropolitan’ friends in the British media. He wrote bitterly about our assault on foreign cities which were now littered with ghastly Irish pubs filled with ghastly Irish immigrants engaged in a kind of ‘mindless gabbling known as craic.’ Later on, he was full of praise for Eastern European builders who had recently, and mercifully, flooded into Britain, tarmacking driveways far more cheaply and effectively than the ‘horde of bodgers and shysters’ from you-know-where. Arguably, most offensively of all, he appeared to attribute Yorkshire accents to the Irishliving in Britain, when he declared that this branch of the diaspora’s main preoccupation was standing “in dole queues moaning about the ‘fookin British.’”

3. Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector)

Cromwell described the Irish as ‘barbarous wretches’ who were in the service of the ‘anti-Christ.’ He did a lot more, as has been well documented by primary school teachers, secondary school teachers, and Irish people who have entangled themselves in drunken rows with English people in pubs. His record, it must be said, has also been subject to the odd apologia by a few provocative eggheads with books to flog. His administration is arguably second only to Brian Cowen’s in terms of the hostility it aroused. In 1997, Bertie Ahern famously refused to step into a room in Downing Street until the portrait of Cromwell that hung on the wall was covered up.

2. Edmund Spenser (Poet)

Edmund Spenser’s spell living as a landlord in Munster left him with a distinctly poor impression of the country. He jotted down all these impressions in the coyly titled ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland.’ Admirably, he did not restrict himself to simply moaning about the problem of the Irish but proceeded to offer some concrete, proactive and radical solutions. His prescriptions, which did not make it as far as a government white paper, involved the wholesale destruction of Irish culture and customs, if necessary by violence. One of his more practical proposals involved the government employing scorched earth policies in an effort to bring about famine. There is debate among historians over whether Spenser advocated a full on genocide or just an extremely radical programme of social engineering.

1. Stephen Jones (Sunday Times Rugby Correspondent)

Cromwell may have slaughtered people on a grand scale and Spenser may have come close to recommending the extermination of the Irish but neither man omitted Brian O’Driscoll from their 2009 Lions Test teams. Stephen Jones did, and he has to live with that.