No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization

Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliche in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. Apart from want ads for personal household workers, the NINA slogan has not turned up in the newspapers. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably no such signs ever existed at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America. Irish Americans all have heard about them?and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up5 Historicaliy,