\u201cThe fog and rain were part of the fun. Meals in my grandparents\u2019 house \u2013 potatoes, gammon, soda bread \u2013 were baked in a huge grate warmed by an ever-burning turf fire,\u201d remembers the now 72-year-old Financial Times writer.<\/p>\n
The childhood stories told in These Divided Isles are no chapters from a nostalgic John Hinde history, however, but rather ones that help to explain his interest in, and understanding of, the Anglo-Irish relationship.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am privileged to be Irish as well as British,\u201d says Stephens, who finally applied for and got his Irish passport in the 1990s, along with his children, after his mother had died.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt my Irishness more after she died. It just hadn\u2019t occurred to me to get one before. I suppose I wanted to honour her memory by making a bit of a statement that I am Irish, as well as British.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raised in a then new housing estate in Kingston-upon-Thames, now a London suburb, by his Irish mother and Welsh father, Stephens never suffered from anti-Irish discrimination, noticing negativity but once.<\/p>\n
\u201cI must have been seven or eight, so that would put it in the early-1960s, in one of the seaside towns that we used to go to \u2013 Folkestone, Hastings or Littlehampton, I don\u2019t remember which \u2013 when I saw a sign on a bed and breakfast.<\/p>\n
![\"Philip](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/WVZVEPRPWVHAVH5TOXLYHU3AP4.jpg\")
Philip Stephens on ‘Ned’ the donkey, with his brother Paul <\/p>\n
\u201cIt said, \u201cNo Blacks, no Irish\u201d. I don\u2019t remember it saying anything about dogs, to be honest. What I remember is \u2018No Blacks, no Irish\u2019. I remember saying to my mother, \u201cWhat\u2019s that about? Are we Irish? <\/p>\n
\u201cI remember her saying, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re all silly. They\u2019re just silly people\u2019. And she took me away by the hand. She was obviously embarrassed by it,\u201d Stephens says, speaking in his Wandsworth home in south London.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0\u2018No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs\u2019: Irish Times readers recall seeing notorious signs in BritainOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The Troubles largely passed him by. With an English accent and an English-sounding surname, he escaped the anti-Irish discrimination prevalent in the wake of IRA bombings in England in the early-1970s.<\/p>\n With a strong Irish identity, Stephens had no doubt where he stood on IRA violence: \u201cMy mother would often remind me, nothing then or subsequently justified the merciless violence inflicted on the people of Northern Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n Stephens had wanted to become a historian, but, instead, spent decades with the Financial Times as a senior correspondent, before reverting to his first love over the last few years by beginning a three-volume history on Britain\u2019s place in the world.<\/p>\n The first volume, Britain Alone, traced Britain\u2019s path since the Suez crisis in 1956; These Divided Isles tracks its history with its nearest neighbour, Ireland; while the third, yet unwritten, volume will cover its relationship with the United States.<\/p>\n During the post-2008 crash, people in Britain were really impressed by the [Irish] resilience and the willingness to take pain and to emerge from it<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Making Ireland the second volume appeared obvious to Stephens, who strongly opposed Brexit<\/a> and still rails at the repeated failure of Brexiteers to understand the significance of the Irish Border.<\/p>\n His feelings about the relationship between the two countries are tinged with a degree of sadness, though, especially given the heights reached, ironically, in the years immediately before the Brexit referendum.<\/p>\n Queen Elizabeth\u2019s 2011 visit to Ireland \u201cspoke to a deep change in mindset\u201d, with her words in Dublin Castle offering a recognition that \u201cBritain no longer saw the Republic as a backward former colony\u201d.<\/p>\n Yet, that soon passed in the eyes of Brexiteers, especially Boris Johnson<\/a>, the one who most benefited personally from it, and a man forever guilty in Stephens\u2019s eyes of \u201cignorance and duplicity\u201d.<\/p>\n For them, \u201cIreland was an irritation and something that could be sorted. It certainly wasn\u2019t something that was going to be allowed to get in the way of this great project to \u2018restore\u2019 British sovereignty.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a mixture of indifference, a certain contempt, too. There\u2019s always been a section of the Tory<\/a> party, the English nationalists\u2019 section, which has been pro-unionist, as well as anti-European,\u201d Stephens declares.<\/p>\n Though his mother\u2019s experience of emigration<\/a> to Britain was good, Stephens highlights the attitudes displayed often towards the Irish who had travelled across the Irish Sea from \u00c9amon de Valera\u2019s Ireland in search of work.<\/p>\n In the eyes of London, they were cheap, willing labour, prepared to endure hardship. If little noticed by British officials, however, they were ignored entirely by the land of their birth, even when Dublin was warned about the \u201cshocking\u201d conditions many faced.<\/p>\n \u201cDe Valera joined those complaining about the dire conditions faced by Irish workers in Britain. It apparently did not occur to him to ask why they were prepared to endure the hardships,\u201d says Stephens.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, they were put into a different category by British officials to immigrants from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth who had come, or been recruited, to fill job post-second World War job vacancies.<\/p>\n In a report to the British cabinet in 1955, officials drew sharp distinctions between the economic and social dislocation that could be caused by \u201ccoloured\u201d immigrants, compared with the minimal impact of the Irish.<\/p>\n Despite history, the Irish were not \u201ca different race from the ordinary inhabitants of Great Britain\u201d, the report went on, seeing Irish workers as cheap labour that could be integrated without significant disruption or local complaint. <\/p>\n The idea that neutrality is a pillar of Irish independence no longer holds, if it ever did<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Irish emigrants showed little appetite to return home, Stephens records. In January 1958 the Irish ambassador in London, Con Cremin, challenged \u201cmany of the familiar assumptions of unskilled, low-paid and exploited workers\u201d.<\/p>\n The majority were so, he said, but there was another story, too, one where Irish office workers, teachers, nurses and doctors were beginning to move up the economic and social ladder. <\/p>\n \u201cThe Irish, he said, were not thought, as with the Germans or the French, to be \u2018foreign\u2019. Rather, they were part of the family \u2013 \u2018no more alien to the English than the Welsh or Scots\u2019. Their Catholic faith was rarely held against them,\u201d writes Stephens.<\/p>\n In the 1990s, \u201cthe overwhelming feeling\u201d among the majority of British people after the Belfast Agreement<\/a> was that the people of both countries could \u201cnow get on with being friends\u201d, freed of the baggage of history.<\/p>\n \u201cIt took the British a while to realise that Ireland wasn\u2019t the theocratic state it had been. Brexit, unfortunately, disturbed all that, creating a point of friction on an issue that a lot of people cared a lot about, not just in the political class,\u201d he went on.<\/p>\n Contrary to the general belief, he now believes that the partition of the island ordered by the Government of Ireland Act in 1921 took place not because London \u201cwanted to hang on to a bit of its empire\u201d, but the very opposite.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wanted to get out, but it wanted to get out in a way that didn\u2019t damage its standing in the rest of the empire. The ideal for Lloyd George would have been a united Ireland, but one remaining within the Commonwealth family.\u201d<\/p>\n A century later, the attitudes displayed in Britain during the Brexit referendum highlighted attitudes that will need to be understood in Ireland if the campaign for a United Ireland develops momentum in the years ahead.<\/p>\n \u201cBrexit illuminated the dichotomy in the British view of Northern Ireland. One is, it wants to get rid of it. But, two, it is not going to let the Irish take it. It\u2019s a bit like the attitude to the Falklands,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Support for a United Ireland in Northern Ireland grew significantly on the back of the conduct of Johnson, with most people believing that success for the Reform Party<\/a> in the 2029 Westminster elections will further fuel support.<\/p>\n Stephens accepts some of the predictions about such an outcome, but not all. Undoubtedly, Reform in power would be more hostile to the European Union, constantly threatening the Belfast Agreement and Brussels\/London post-Brexit deals.<\/p>\n However, he is less convinced that such an administration would call, as the Belfast Agreement lays down, a unity referendum if and when the Northern Ireland secretary of the day judges that such a referendum would pass.<\/p>\n [\u00a0\u2018Bad girls\u2019: When the Irish State sought to ban emigration of young women to BritainOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n \u201cReform would be more accommodating of unionists\u2019 hostile to unity and more defensive of the union. But that\u2019s an almost emotional impulse rather than sound strategic judgment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Scotland will become independent before Northern Ireland votes to join with the Republic, he believes: \u201cThe more often I go to Scotland<\/a>, the more I realise that it really feels like a different country now. It is growing apart.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Newton Emerson: ‘Scotland shows how an apparently unstoppable national cause can stall when mishandled by one party’Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n In the wake of the Brexit differences, Stephens believes that some of the damage to Anglo-Irish relations of the last decade can be undone. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is less indifference, there is a lot less condescension. There is a respect, if a grudging respect sometimes, that Ireland has emerged as a strong economic force,\u201d says Stephens.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the post-2008 crash, people in Britain were really impressed by the resilience and the willingness to take pain, as it were, and to emerge from it. People in Britain were really struck by that.\u201d<\/p>\n However, new points of division on the horizon loom, including Irish attitudes on neutrality<\/a>, but most especially the fact that Ireland spends less than 1 per cent of its GDP on defence.<\/p>\n This provokes irritation, he argues. Recalling a recent conversation with a senior British official, Stephens said the official complained with irritation that Ireland enjoys \u201ca security umbrella\u201d from Washington \u201cand, to a degree, London\u201d, without charge.<\/p>\n Historically, Ireland\u2019s neutrality was rooted in an understandable desire not to be linked militarily to Britain, but this is now less understandable to friendly states \u201cin a world of Putin and Russia\u201d.<\/p>\n\n
![\"Philip](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/JEXVDQDIWFHFXCYFADBLBECD2Y.jpg\")
Philip Stephens with his mother Teresa and brother Paul in Kiltimagh as one of the first bungalows in the Mayo town was being built in the 1960s <\/p>\n\n