Republican News · Thursday 6 March 2003

BHS faces boycott after owner's anti-Irish comments

BY FERN LANE

The billionaire British businessman, Phillip Green, is facing a boycott of his shops after making anti-Irish remarks to the Guardian newspaper during an investigation by the paper of his business dealings.

Green is the owner of a huge retailing empire, including BHS, Top Shop, Top Man, Burton, Wallis and Miss Selfridge and is currently trying to acquire the Safeway supermarket chain for £3 billion. The newspaper says Green suggested that Irish people are illiterate.

The report in Wednesday's edition alleges that Green made his comments to one of its reporters during a prolonged "expletive-laden" outburst in which Green attacked the newspaper's financial editor, Paul Murphy, saying: "He can't read English. Mind you, he's a fucking Irishman."

The paper says that Green also made anti-Irish comments to the editor, Alan Rushbridger, whilst offering an interpretation of a set of financial figures, saying "even an Irishman like Paul Murphy ought to be able to understand that". For its own part, the Guardian seemed slightly miffed that their man, "born in Oldham and raised in Portsmouth", should be accused of being Irish.

The London Irish Centre called Green's comments a "truly deplorable piece of racism that is breathtaking in its arrogance" and called for a boycott by Irish people of his retail outlets.

Green, clearly a philistine as well as a bigot, hastily issued an apology and, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, resorted to the old line so beloved of racists everywhere. "Some of my best friends are Irish," he claimed, no doubt with a completely straight face, adding that his comments were made "in the heat of the moment".