My Irish ancestors dug canals by hand in upstate NY in the 1830s and 1840s when they first got here. I guess you could have called them ditch diggers. I don’t take offense when someone mentions “ditch diggers”
I live near the old Erie Canal. They used to pay the Irish immigrants $5.00 and a bottle of whiskey a day to dig the thing (I guess THEY knew the labor market they were working with — JUST KIDDING).
They were lots of white cotton pickers also. Not racial to me.
I refer to my Hibernian ancestors as “mackerel snappers”.