Paper offers proof of ‘No Irish need apply’ ads

For generations Irish Americans retained a folk memory of the time when they were not welcome among polite society in the US and when newspapers and business owners from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s featured advertisements that baldly stated: ‘No Irish need apply.’

That was challenged by a prominent American historian who dismissed widespread anti-Irish discrimination as a legend fostered by cultural imagination and ignorance.

According to Richard Jensen, former professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago, the so-called NINA ads barely existed — if at all. In a 2002 article in the Oxford Journal of Social History entitled: “‘No Irish Need Apply’: A Myth of Victimisation” Jensen claimed the signs were a fabricated memory of Irish-Americans to make themselves appear as victims.