Working like blacks

Mary O’Rourke’s praise for her Athlone selection convention team, saying that “they worked like blacks” has become a media event.

It’s an old expression, I often heard it in my youth, that has become outlawed through a combination of justifiable concern about racism and the overweening bullshit that is political correctness.

Paradoxically, it is a compliment to the work ethic of “blacks”, surely far more desirable than the often derogatory comments about “lazy scroungers” etc which epitomise the language of racists.