Being Irish is complex

WHAT does being Irish mean? Does it, in fact, mean anything?

For instance, I’m Irish. I was born and raised in Birmingham in England.

I’m now 58 and I came to live in Ireland when I was 34.

My parents had emigrated from Cork in the 1950s and I was raised amongst a huge Irish community. I always say that I didn’t really mix with any English people until I went to University in the mid 1980s.

I say all that as factual recounting not as explanation or justification.

What those using the ludicrous Plastic Paddy jibe never seemed to understand was that being Irish wasn’t an aspirational thing for the second generation.

It was just being who you were.

Did anybody think that an Irishness, the Irishness of 1970s and 1980s England, that was associated with being thick and violent was something you wanted to be?

If we were going to fake an identity why would we choose an Irish one?

I first went to Ireland, by the way, as a baby in my mother’s arms to my grandfather’s funeral.

James Connolly didn’t set