Noel Gallagher felt “demonised” growing up with Irish heritage
Former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher has said that he felt “demonised” growing up in the Irish community in Manchester due to the ongoing Troubles and IRA bombings.
The musician, who releases his High Flying Birds album Council Skies on June 2nd, recalled returning to Manchester in the mid-1970s after holidaying at his grandmother’s house in county Mayo and having the family car searched by British soldiers with sniffer dogs.
In an interview with the Sunday Independent, Gallagher said: “When you’re with your parents, you feel safe. But when they’re taking your Uncle Paddy out of the car, and then you go off into a room and the sniffer dogs come out and they’d have mirrors underneath the car? I didn’t really realise then what they were searching for.”
“I was too young to understand. I was old enough to hear it on the news but young enough not to completely understand it. Obviously, I know more about it now than I did then — like the Birmingham Six and all that,” he continued.
Gallagher concluded: “The Irish community in Manchester circled the wagons, because the Irish community were demonised. I felt that at the time. But I would only have been six, seven, eight when it [the IRA bombing campaign of mainland Britain] was going on in 1974 and 1975. I was born in 1967.”
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