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jobs ads were posted with "no Irish need apply" in newspapers and at the hiring companies.

A historian recently researched it and could find almost no contemporary evidence for it ever happening. Less than ten examples in tens of thousands of newspapers he reviewed over decades.

But many thousands of Irish "remembered" it vividly.

http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm

“A historian recently researched it and could find almost no contemporary evidence for it ever happening.”

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.

It strikes me as possible, though, that such a policy could well have been followed even if unwritten. For example, “separate but equal” was well understood by its “adherents” as not really equal at all. Would overt bigotry such as that purported to be behind “no Irish need apply” necessarily be widely written?

For the record, I’m Swedish by ancestry, so I really don’t care one way or the other.

A historian recently researched it and could find almost no contemporary evidence for it ever happening. Less than ten examples in tens of thousands of newspapers he reviewed over decades.

But many thousands of Irish "remembered" it vividly.

From your link:

The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service.

LOL! Your link equivocated with this statement and then said it almost never happened. Here's your sign:

Logic Need Not Apply

I quickly found another link for a syllabus, http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish/unit_2.html, that included this:

The British historian Edward Freeman visited the United States in 1881. His obituary states that "he gloried in the Germanic origin of the English nation." On his return from America, he wrote: "This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it. I find this sentiment generally approved - sometimes with the qualification that they want Irish and Negroes for servants, not being able to get any other." - Curtis, Anglo Saxons..., op.cit., p.81

Just look at Thomas Nast's cartoons to find out the sentiment of the day.

With the xenophobia culminating in the creation of the Know Nothing Parties, sworn to overcome the Irish threat, it takes little imagination to see the numerous citizens that would have been terrified to hire an Irish person. At that time, it was not forbidden by law and is certain to have been a common practice.