I know there's a lot of weird racial ideology from back then (1850s), if going only by old editorial cartoons and whatnot, depicting the Irish as "white apes" and such. But did the Rudyard Kiplings of the day regard the (Catholic) Irish as being more or less in the same category as the Burmese, vis a vis the Empire? Or did they view the Irish as more or less like the Scottish and Welsh minus the Protestantism?
I'll tell you, the ethno-religious history of the Balkans confuses me less than that of Ireland.
The analogy may apply to earlier centuries - the 17th, perhaps the 18th, but in the 19th Ireland moved progressively toward centre stage in domestic politics, even sparking fears of a UK civil war in 1914.
Ireland was from 1801 a part of the UK and represented at Westminster, its Catholic majority notionally on an equal footing after 1829 (though in practice often excluded from participation by property qualifications - pre-Famine Ireland had about 32% of the UK population but perhaps 11% of the electorate). So it was no longer officially perceived as a colony, though Irish nationalists came to view its status in such a light.
Status was heavily influenced by the religious divide (as was English antipathy), with Irish Protestants (perhaps a fifth of the population) often part of the establishment: Wellington and Castlereagh were Dubliners by birth.
A wilder Scotland may well sum up English notions, but with the complication of most Irish finding themselves on the other side of a religious rift that had come to underscore much of English and then British identity in the 16th-17th centuries.