Brendan Montague is a second-generation immigrant whose family is from Ireland. He is the editor of The Ecologist. He spoke to The Prisma about how his working-class Irish background has informed his 30-year career as a journalist and how the media comes into direct and indirect contact with immigrant communities in the UK. Series “Journalists and migrants in the UK.
Zac Liew
It was rough being Irish during the 1970s in England. Being white was not a saving grace. Brendan’s parents witnessed the ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ signs and the racism his Irish family faced.
His mum had fled poverty in Ireland in search of better opportunities.
“Some of my extended family weren’t given jobs because they had Irish names and accents. At school, people used to tell jokes about the Irish being stupid, and I got into trouble responding to that,” he says. This is what he was born into. Some of his aunts had black and Asian partners and he came to see that he shared an experience of poverty and discrimination with a range of different groups. Brendan had free school meals and turned up to class in threadbare second-hand clothes.
But it was not always a case of everyone banding together to fight oppression.
“We were ostracised by some within the Irish community because we weren’t racist, and because some of our family had relationships with people with a different skin colour, crazy as it now sounds,” he says.
Brendan’s English dad had been the editor of his student paper and wrote political pieces for newspapers. He laid the ground for Brendan to pick up the pen but raised an eyebrow when his son told him he was going to write for the Daily Mail. By this point Brendan had made a name for himself at local and regional newspapers.
“When working for a local paper, a more senior reporter told me that 50% of journalists for The Guardian came from the Daily Mail and the other 50% went to private school,” he explains.
There was a perception that if you were working class and wanted to write for The Guardian then you had to prove your mettle at the Mail first.
His six months there equipped him with skills he wouldn’t have sharpened writing for more progressive but more cash-strapped national newspapers such as The Independent or The Guardian.
The Mail is the best-funded national newspaper and had the resources to send him out knocking on doors and talking to people to break exclusive stories. He learnt a lot interviewing people he did not agree with, such as climate deniers.
But he looks back on his time at the Mail with regret.
“There were stories around immigration and race that clearly had a racist agenda. I did everything to avoid personally becoming involved in that. But that’s not enough.” “I learned, to my cost, that if you work in a way that compromises your principles, it’s very bad for your health. I wouldn’t do it again. It was a mistake.”
Although Brendan no longer wants to work for the Guardian, he has been Editor of The Ecologist for the past nine years. He has written for The Observer, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph among others.
He does not believe his Irishness made it harder to get work as a journalist. This may be down to his French surname. It may be related to the decline of racism towards Irish people in the UK, especially after the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998 ended the Troubles. National newspapers and the media had less motive to peddle racial stereotypes about Irish people.
These factors mean his whiteness has, as a working journalist, exempted him from experiencing the kind of discrimination and social exclusion suffered by immigrants who have black or brown skin, in an industry where, Brendan says, most national newspapers are still institutionally racist.
“The important thing is that I’m white, so people who are racist towards darker-skinned people would not be prejudiced against me,” he says. “My experience is different, and mostly easier, than people who are visibly minority ethnic.
“I don’t think editors employed me because I was the child of a migrant, I think they did in spite of me being one, they just didn’t realise. In a way I kind of snuck in.” He remembers walking into the office at The Sunday Telegraph one morning and noticing a black person in the newsroom. This was not something he had seen before. He wondered if his colleague worked for features, travel, or the sports desk. But it turned out he was there to fix the photocopier.
Reuters found that in 2024 only 7% of editors are people of colour in the UK. Journalism remains one of the least diverse industries in the region.
“Even in the progressive parts of the media, about 50% of staff are taken from the 7% of people who attended private schools,” Brendan says.
“If an editor needs to get a quote quickly, they will ring someone in their personal network. And if they have two English parents and went to a private school, they might be less likely to include migrants in a story, or even care about whether they do or not.”
Some reporters would not be aware that they have fewer migrants in their social networks than most working-class people in cities. In this way they might not realise that they’re part of systems that exclude certain demographics.
Journalists who came from private schools are also less likely to be able to relate to the experiences of migrants and meet them at eye level.
Brendan has set up the Ecologist Writers’ Fund to give underrepresented people in journalism or in the environment movement the chance to write articles for The Ecologist and be paid a fee.
Vilification and demonisation of migrants
Having discussed some ways that migrants are inadvertently excluded from the newsroom, Brendan says the mainstream media must take more responsibility for how they ‘scapegoat, vilify and demonise’ migrants.
“The relatively small number of people who seek asylum here each year are blamed for a wide range of problems actually caused by the actions or inactions of political parties,” he says. “The demonisation has spread from asylum seekers, to migrants, to anyone who can be racialised and marginalised.” Brendan He explains that even progressive national newspapers normalise the ‘vilification’ by repeatedly quoting politicians saying ‘appalling things’ and reinforcing the fear of migrant numbers.
He then points out that the UK has contributed to wars, dictatorships, and colonialist ventures- historically and currently- which force many people to migrate in the first place.
“Now more than ever we need real solutions to the problems of housing, health and education, and migrant workers would obviously play a significant part in delivering these solutions,” he says.
The bigger picture: a slice of hope
Across wider society, Brendan sees signs that racial discrimination is dwindling, even with the media whipping up fear towards ethnic minorities and migrants.
“It’s like the candle that burns brightly when it burns last: racists are understanding that they’re losing and are becoming quite loud and obnoxious as a result of that,” he says.
“And I think younger people in metropolitan areas grow up around people from different backgrounds and racism just seems completely obviously a stupid point of view.”
He adds that racism has had to adopt a sort of code. Instead of people with racist ideas explicitly saying they don’t like black or brown or Irish people, like they did when Brendan was a child, they say that they don’t like Muslims or immigrants and that they are socially conservative and worried about the erosion of British values. In this way racism has been mapped onto religion.
He explains that institutionally racist political movements push issues such as housing shortages, lack of health care or education services because writing explicitly racist leaflets wouldn’t get them very far.
“Elon Musk will promote anti-immigrant ideas on Twitter because it suits him better than to have people on social media blaming him for accumulating so much wealth and not paying enough tax, and then seeing that’s the real reason people don’t have the schools and hospitals that they need,” he says.
(Photos supplied by the interviewee)
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