Coyler

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Is anybody's obscure or smaller team Þór Akureyri

But he said negro.

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Haha! It is f*cking fantastic though.

Always presumed that that was a very good pisstake.

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Joking apart, even for massive proverbial racist John Terry it just strikes me as a hugely unlikely thing for him to have called him off his own bat, for the first time (Ledley King rumours notwithstanding) in the twilight of his career. You'd have to give him the benefit of the doubt really seeing as Ferdinand never heard him and the context of the footage is inconclusive. That line from the lawyer about the possibility of a voice in the crowd saying the word at the precise time makes me think he is f***ing guilty though.

Specifically Irish costume, hairdos, beard fashion, etc., not to mention the language, are consistently mentioned in travellers' accounts, poetry, English statutes, and so on. Not saying it was a simple case of two different races, though; I presume, for instance, that the low breeding of the churl of English or Welsh stock would also have been instantly recognizable by such markers as well, the better to facilitate common or garden status discrimination all the way down the feudal chain. But the ethnically Irish were identifiable for hundreds of years at first glance and their lesser status was legal fact. I'm not sure how much they toned it down, costumewise, in areas of close interaction, but even then their language would still have been an almost instant giveaway. (Ooh speaking of which, there was an article I read somewhere about a gunpowder explosion on Wood Quay in Dublin in the late sixteenth century and somehow the inquest that followed survived; among the witnesses were a load of dock labourers who all had Irish surnames and Irish first names. No great shakes you might think, and of course it seems obvious, but it is a glimpse of a Gaelic urban underclass about whose daily life we know absolutely nothing.) But whatever about the city Irish, from the suburban 'Irishtowns' back out towards the country it seems from all accounts in almost all eras that you are talking about a very recognizably different people.

No, that's fair enough nowadays, you're absolutely spot on. And I suppose to an extent assimilation within half a generation was theoretically an option for the Irish from day one, as it was, more celebratedly, for the English in the other direction. The point is that for most of the people in Ireland, over the centuries, the external indicators of high-status vs low-status ethnicity would have been as instantly suggestive to the beholder as skin colour has been elsewhere, for better or for worse, up till modern times. It's totally understandable that the integrated Irishman in Britain and perhaps a lot of people in Ireland don't give much consideration to that particular golden thread running through most of whatever strife there was over the old '800 years'; I think recent events (last two hundred years or so ) have meant that it's not unusual for the entire saga to be vaguely thought of as just a long struggle for self-determination. We're all the same now, like,* which is great—with the odd phrenological throwback like Martin Keown here and there. *But not because it's the English who have become more Irish, I'll tell you that much for nothing, but that's another story...

Maybe he's telling the truth

In the good old days when they could tell an Irishman from an Englishman almost instantly by his dress or his tongue (or indeed by the very pig under his arm) the Brits certainly did take full advantage of that fact and did handily categorize your forefathers as subhuman.* They enshrined this racism in their statutes and when they eventually had the military wherewithal to break out of the cities and the Pale they treated the Irish as if they believed it. They systematically went about dismantling the entire native civilization—'turning' leaders, destroying records and artifacts, dispossessing landowners, physically uprooting communities and replanting and replacing—on the pretext of bringing the whole savage place up to their higher standards. Is this "all the terrible things" you mention, the awful stuff that seemingly wasn't as bad as considering them cattle? They did it for ages and ages and ages. I don't know what more you want. As long as they didn't pack them off like livestock on slave ships to work on the plantations in the West Indies and the American colonies, you mean, is it? Well they did that as well, ffs. *Including Diarmaid na nGall McMurphman who invited them over in the first place...

I cheerfully made monkey noises at Mark Rutherford (class winger for Shelbourne) whenever he played against Bohs when I was in my early teens (he ended up playing for us later on) until it sort of fizzled out. I also screamed "You black b*****d!" at the telly when Andy Cole scored for United against Liverpool, in front of my mam who went spare at me. Would have been about 19 or 20, which I find absolutely unbelievable looking back.

Well there's that time he said something that made all the black players of the opposing team within earshot go absolutely mental, but we can only speculate what that was all about.

True enough, that's exactly what they ended up saying. "Individual who we are totally convinced is not a racist made reference to skin colour in what he claims wasn't an offensive way, we reckon he's a liar and we're giving him a massive ban." If Suárez actually did and said what they found him to have done and said, he would be, like, pretty much the king of all the racists

Or using very offensive words while 'bantering' on the radio.

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Some very worrying body language there in those pictures. I hope to God I'm wrong...