Nowt to do with me but, jokes are jokes and there is always some one or something getting the piss taken about them. If someone cracks a joke about a Scot or Scotland my response is to reply with a joke or something funny about the person telling the joke.
I hear what you're saying Looney, but I, and every Irishman I know, subscribe to the views in the wikipedia entry below. Johy Lydon's autobiography wasn't called "No Blacks, No Irish" because he liked the sound of it. It was taken from a sign common in London in clubs, and also Landlord adverts up until the late 60s and early 70s.
The wiki article is below :_
"...however, the Irish joke has more sinister origins. The Irish joke originates in the simian portrayal of Irish people in English comic magazines of the mid-late 19th century - depicting the Irish as stupid apes given to agrarian and alcohol-fuelled violence against their benevolent and tolerant English masters.
Punch magazine was a particular notorious purveyor of this type of comedy. In the context of the 'Laissez Faire' effective genocide of the Great Famine and the following mass displacement of the following three decades, a great many Irish view the Irish joke as, at best, offensive and, at worst, as similar to "nigger" jokes against negroes or "gas oven" humour targetted at Jews.
All these forms of humour have, at their core, the debasement of their subjects to the point of dehumanising them so that malevolent acts against them are less offensive - or even justifiable.
It can only be assumed that the Irish joke has survived the era of political correctness as a consequence of the fact that the Irish are white (i.e. not black) and that the successful English propoganda of the 1840s-1930s has created a global acceptance that the Famine was simply a tragedy or Act of God (and not the subject of deliberate genocide in the way that the Jews were in 1930s-40s Germany and its annexes.
This, of course,glosses over the fact that Ireland of the 1840s had adequate food for its population but that its grain was being sold to England and the US, or being shipped to Australia to feed England's new colonies and convict settlements there - forcing the majority of the dispossessed native Irish to live off a single crop of potatoes grown on miniscule plots of land that were subdivided on every succession (Catholics were denied primogeniture succession rights under the anti-Catholic Penal Laws).
Some hold that Irish jokes have recently been reclaimed by the Irish themselves and reversed to ridicule the (usually English) joke teller, e.g.
Q: Why are Irish jokes so simplistic?A: So Englishmen can understand them.
or
A Kerryman emigrated from Ireland to England, thereby increasing the average IQ of both countries. (A reference to
Will Rogers phenomenon, which refers to a Kerryman as even less smart than an average Irishman but the real joke is that it implies an Englishman is even less intelligent.) This "attempt" to turn the tables may be a reaction to the fact the Black and Jew jokes are no longer acceptable - but Irish jokes are still deemed acceptable in England and its former colonies of USA, Canada and Australia/New Zealand."
Now you can get an idea why the great majority of Irish people find "Irish jokes" deeply offensive.