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| Study of Sean O’Casey by Dublin artist Reginald Gray, for the New York Times (1966) |
"Sean O’Casey... a ‘West Brit’ or a ‘shoneen’?" This is the question southern protestant Irish blogger Patrick Comerford asked sardonically. A jibe at the violently hysterical reaction to his play 'The Play and the Stars' in which he challenged the unchallengeable - the inviolable 1916 revolutionary orthodoxy. That blog post written in 2011 looked directly at the term "west-Brit", it's origins and etymology in an article entitled, "‘West Brit’ is a racist and pejorative term unacceptable in a pluralist democracy". Patrick began by explaining that the term started out as a non-pejorative, positive sobriquet:
"Daniel O’Connell used the term positively in a debate in the House of Commons in 1832 when he said: “The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Briton if made so in benefits and justice; but if not, we are Irishmen again.”It then became a negative, pejorative term:
"The term “West Brit” gained prominent usage in the land struggle of the 1880s. By the 1900s, DP Moran, founder of The Leader, was using the term frequently to describe people he did not consider to be sufficiently Irish. It was synonymous with those he described as “Sourfaces,” those who mourned the death of Queen Victoria, and It included virtually all members of the Church of Ireland and those Roman Catholics who did not measure up to his definition of “Irish Irelanders”."
