Pretend Irish People Celebrating St Patrick's Day On Sunday

[dave50]

So I wonder how many English people will be out celebrating, wearing green and those stupid Guinness hats and because they think it's so 'cool' to be Irish they will be trying to convince everyone who will listen that they are actually Irish just because their great great great grandmother visited Dublin once for 5 minutes.
I just hope these same people will put as much effort into celebrating St George's day when the time comes but I won't hold my breath as they won't even know what date it is.

[mibn2cweus]

I think it's all rather silly to define oneself by who your parents are or where they happened to be when the best part of me ran down me mother's leg. "I'm more than that! I know I am. At least, I think I must be." :o/

[joko]

is it not also silly to define yourself merely by the geographical location your house is in though?
or on the location of the hospital your mum gave birth in?

what if a person lives all over the place? does that change when they move?

so if someone family is born and bred in ireland for many generations but you move to the uk - that makes you english ?

so all those foreign people moving here are suddenly now english too? or do they retain who they are regardless?


far more logical to define yourself based on a family history and blood line than geography...

[FredPuli43]

Understand that , joko. I have Irish ancestry and my mother was Irish. All my life, I have felt Irish rather than English; for one thing, when the English said, dismissively, of some seemingly illogical statement, "That's Irish", I always understood it. I think there is a way with words, and a way of thinking and seeing things, which is cultural (doubtless,in my case,learned at my mother's knee) and which defines the individual as Irish rather than English.

But I do have difficulty accepting that an American from Chicago is "Irish" when he shows no sign of those characteristics. That seems pure sentimentality and an effort to distinguish himself from all the other "hyphenated Americans" (and the non-hyphenated, too)