There’s a long, not very well known, history of relationships between Ireland and
Jamaica that goes back to the very first years of when Britain took over the islands in
the Caribbean that were first claimed by the Spanish. Irish indentured labourers were
brought from Barbados around the time when there were only about one thousand
African slaves in Jamaica and consequently it is reckoned that a quarter of Jamaicans
carry Irish DNA within them. As well as DNA, the Jamaican accent, food such as ‘Irish
potato’ and ‘Irish moss’, and some festivities are heavily influenced by the Irish people
who lived and died in the Caribbean over 400 years ago.

Also, there is the common bond of being put under the British yoke: Ireland being
Britain’s first colony where its blueprint of eradication of language, culture and the
names of the subjugated were established as a model that would be taken to Africa,
Asia and the Caribbean. Some members of the families (who became known as the
Anglo-Irish or The Protestant Ascendancy) who came from England to govern the
dispossessed Irish later became governors of Jamaica.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the Irish and Jamaicans began to mix again in large
numbers, this time in the cooler climes of post-war Britain. People from the Caribbean
and Ireland were recruited to take on many of the same sort of jobs in the new National
Health Service, the railways and heavy industries. Prejudice was something both West
Indians and the Irish experienced at that time and Doctor Tom Murray of the Irish
Studies Centre in London can attest that the signs ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ did
exist, no matter what some revisionists now claim. Away from work, the Jamaicans were
looking for a drink that reminded them of home, as were the Irish, and they found
comfort in a common beverage: Guinness. Social interactions and then intermarriages
inevitably happened and when I lived in Britain it was a rarity to meet someone of mixed
heritage from Birmingham, Manchester or Liverpool that didn’t have an Irish parent or
grandparent.

In What Goes Around the central character Robbie Walker establishes a strong and
profound friendship with Danny Maguire from Belfast and in many ways this sort of
relationship was replicated many thousands of times over in real life. It was not only
those who had sailed to Britain from the ports in the Caribbean and Ireland that found a
commonality in their experience but also their children’s generation shared a common
struggle at times, and it was another aspect of my own experiences of growing up in
England that I felt obliged to include in my debut novel.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/28/no-reason-to-doubt-irish-no-blacks-signs