SCOTLAND Yard says there were no anti Irish incidents. Not reported ones, anyway. It was not like the 1970s, when even Kerrygold butter had to be taken off supermarket shelves in England for fear of reprisals.
But all the same, there's a man from Northern Ireland who does some work for Paddy, from Galway. Paddy told me that the man didn't turn up for his wages on the Friday night. It turned out that his car engine had boiled over. He went into a garage and asked for water. He was jumped on by four men. He was very badly beaten, but regained consciousness after a few days and it is hoped he will soon walk on crutches.
And the Irish Centre got the usual abusive phonecalls. "Why don't you bastard murderers go back to your own country?" And a peace conference in Manchester was cancelled. And one on "The Needs of the Elderly Irish" in London threatened with cancellation. And Billy Power, one of the Birmingham Six, meeting a friend a friend just out of jail after serving 20 years off a flight from Belfast at Heathrow, just after the bomb went off, saw armed policemen scrutinising every Irish traveller. Just like they did the night they lifted hind.
But it depends on who you are and what you are. "The London Irish" are a very complicated group by now. In Minogue's fashionable Irish pub and cafe, in the part of Barnsbury where Tony Blair and other new Labour stars have their houses, the bomb had no impact Not that anyone could measure. "No, the place did not go quiet. You couldn't hear yourself speak, as a matter of fact. We had traditional music that night and the place was absolutely black," Dave Nulty from Dublin, who manages Minogue's, says. It was Friday evening, after all the beginning of the weekend."
Perhaps the "Ryanair generation" who socialise in the warm, laid back atmosphere of Minogue's are too young to feel implicated in peace or war. Because it seems not to be education or money that shapes a response, but experience. That same night, down in wealthy Belgravia, in Motcomb's elegant restaurant and wine bar, the owner, Philip Lawless, did the completely uncharacteristic thing of walking out on his work and going home.
"I couldn't speak. I was too dejected. More depressed than I could explain to anybody." Philip Lawless has business interests in Donegal, near Derry. Now, cross Border tourism may slump again. But that's not what hurt him. It is that he has been here before. An earlier restaurant was bombed. A man was killed. Lawless was caught up in the Balcombe Street siege. He has to fear that all that might be starting again. And above all, John Hume is a personal friend . . .
The people in bars and restaurants were the only ones not to hear the blast which was so huge that it rumbled right across the great plain of London. One woman was "in a practice room in Highgate. Our kids were rehearsing for a BBC show, Music for Youth. They were doing all this Riverdance stuff and it was so loud that I didn't hear the explosion. But the teacher said: "I know that sound. That's a bomb. But I said `No, the bombs are over'."
An elderly Irishwoman lives in a block of flats over a chemist's shop in Hackney. When the bomb went off all the old people came out on their balconies. "That's a bomb," they said. But, she said. "No, it can't be. The chemist's shop must have blown up. Because the bombs are all over.
That was the first thing trying to take in that the peace was over. Then there was the stage of bracing of turning to face the consequences. Andrew, the Oblate novice who is helping with the work of the Irish Welfare Centre, was with a friend who is exceptionally settled and at ease in England. Yet even for that man, Andrew said, when they heard the blast, and took its meaning in, "it was as if he knew that in his day to day living he was going to have to take on an extra burden . . ."
There is the burden of explanation to English people "who don't understand and don't want to understand". And there is the burden of the condemnation trap. Of course everyone wants to condemn, but how do you prevent your condemnation being abused?
The Manchester Donegal Association was having its annual dinner dance - that Friday. A photographer from the Manchester Evening News came along. "I don't want you all smiling and laughing," he told the top table guests. "At that moment I realised exactly why he was there," the lady who organised the dinner said. "It was because of the bomb at Canary Wharf, even though originally he had been allowed to come in and interrupt the meal because he said he had been very impressed by what was going on and he wanted to take some pictures."
The northern England editor of the Irish World commented: "This small, almost insignificant incident shows that the Irish in Britain are once again in a no win situation. What do you do when a photographer asks to take your picture just because the Irish Republican Army has exploded a huge and devastating bomb 200 miles away in London? If you refuse, it looks as if you have something to hide. If you agree, it looks as though you are somehow encouraging the worst kind of urban terrorism.
There are the old style Irish emigrants. "They get it hard when the IRA does a thing like this. They are frightened, going in to day centres and DHSS offices and Job Centres. They have to mix with the Sun readers." But there are more complicated ways of being hurt than getting abuse.
Sean is an escalator engineer, working for a firm with headquarters in northern England. He was actually working in Docklands, installing an escalator, a mile from where the bomb went off. He rang headquarters and they were all joking him: "What have you been up to then, mate?" and so on. "They don't understand. It's not funny. I thought every policeman was looking at me. I couldn't even tell anyone around how disgusted I was because I was keeping my head down."
There are many kinds of London Irish the ones who came with cardboard suitcases and broken hearts in the old days; the modern ones, who happen to be in London but might be in Paris or New York; and the "plastic Paddies" the children of first generation Irish immigrants, who are mostly like the urban young anywhere.
The older Irish have known a lot of racism. "I've been 34 years here and it's been niggle, niggle all the way." When the IRA act, they're the ones who try not to say anything so their accents won't betray them. And they have their own secret views. One man said, in response to a question about the IRA ceasefire: "Well, the good land all around us in Wexford was given to Protestants, and we got nothing and the landlords, when I was growing up, were all Major this and Sir that. And when they'd be out walking their dogs - that's the only time they'd be on the roads, walking their dogs we had to call then Mr this and Major that, but we were just Paddy and Joe . . .
But the young seem free of resentment or shame. "We brought our kids here to London from America," an Irish woman said, in a break from set dancing. "My husband is with Barclay's - they're moving into Canary Wharf, actually. In America, it was an asset to be Irish. Even the blacks wanted to be Irish after they saw The Commitments. We were proud to be Irish. So it's an awful shock to our kids to realise that you can't hold your head high in London, not at the moment. That you have to keep quiet."
But another young woman said: "My mum rang me the minute the news came on the telly. `It's a terrible, terrible thing,' she said. `We'll have to keep our heads down.' I said: `No, we do not have to keep our heads down'."
There is tension between all the others and the overt Republican supporters. "When the bomb went off there was an Irish language class on here," a woman in the Irish Centre in Camden Town said. "One fellow from it was going on afterwards about how it was all the fault of the Brits. `Don't run this country down,' I said to him. `I don't run it down, and I don't run Ireland down either.' And then the next night some of those Saoirse women were in here, the ones that campaign for the prisoners. And Major came on the television and one of them was shouting: `That's who should have been bombed. They should have put the bomb under him.' Well, I was totally disgusted. My butcher the nicest man you could meet, his son was injured in the Regent's Park bomb."
On Thursday, in a cutting wind, some of the long term Irish situation activists demonstrated outside the House of Commons. People from older groups like the Connolly Association, and the Troops Out movement and the Labour Party Irish section had come together after the ceasefire to lobby for "all party peace talks without preconditions". There were perhaps 60 men and women of various political backgrounds circling with their "Don't Scrap the Peace Talks" placards. To general indifference. It wasn't a good day for lobbying Parliament: the report of the Scott Inquiry, due in a few hours, had Westminster buzzing with anticipation.
ONLY Tony Benn was devoting much attention to Ireland. He, and a handful of other speakers, addressed the demonstrators in the warmth of Committee Room 14 at lunchtime. Among MPs, he said, "when there isn't a bomb nobody wants to talk about Ireland. And when there is a bomb, nobody can talk about Ireland. The net result is that Ireland is never talked about ..." He, on the other hand - grandson of a Home Ruler, son of the parliamentarian who protested at the Black and Tans being sent to Ireland, had "always supported the right of the Irish people to self determination". He used the phrase often, without addressing any of its manifest: difficulties.
Outside, the IRA's goal was being pursued through bomb scares. The whole of the West End had come to a seething standstill. All the central Underground stations were closed. Tourists, sick people in trapped ambulances, workers, people trying to get out to the airports tens of thousands of people, and the whole life of the city centre, were held in thrall for the afternoon by the threat of violence. Police cars and fire trucks could not get through the mass of stalled traffic to what turned out to be a device in Shaftesbury Avenue. People stood in the cold outside the iron grilles of the Tube stations. Silent. Stoic. They have done this for years. Londoners endure the frustration. The London Irish endure it and watch it being endured.
Unreachable miles away, in St Michael's Catholic Grammar school in North Finchley, the fifth year girls had tea and biscuits waiting for this reporter. Because they study "the Troubles" and they wanted to talk about the resumption of violence. On the Modern World History part of the GCSE history syllabus you can do either China or Ireland. They're "doing" Ireland. "I always start off at the first lesson," their teacher had told me, "in 1172, when Henry II went to Ireland. And I always tell them because we have every kind of opinion in the class - there are no all good guys and there are no all bad guys in this story . . ."
The time for meeting them ticked away. London was in the IRA's grip.
Those kids, from all kinds of cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, learning: together in the melting pot of London, are the future alternative to bigotry and narrow nationalism. But meeting them, and gaining consolation from them, was not possible. The IRA and its bombs did not allow it.