Th’ Ould Sod? Sod ’em.

I am hardly what people mean when they refer to ‘Irish-Americans’, nor should I care to be so identified: when My Fellow Americans use the term, they have in mind some pathetic, sentimental mythos of immigrants escaping the Famine and ‘the English’ and flocking to Ellis Island and All That. The Kennedy Family Myth, for example: which is hilarious, in a pitiable sort of way, as the Fitzgeralds (and I am a Geraldine long since) were Cambro-Normans who became Hiberno-Normans, ‘the Old English in Ireland’, every Fitzmaurice and Fitzgerald of us, and the Kennedys (likewise appearing in my ancestry) descend with me of the Scots Clan Kennedy, Clann ’icUalraig, of Cassilis and Ailsa. Hardly the fabled ‘plain people of Oireland’…

All the same, my pedigree includes Flann ‘na Sionainne’ mac Máel Sechnaill, Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig, Cellach ‘of the Hard Conflicts’ mac Cerbaill, Tiege Aibhle Ó Cearbhuill of Éile, and many another notable and honored Irish figure.

And for centuries the Irish political class: conniving with the tyrant Bonaparte; conspiring in 1914 with the Wilhelmine Reich … and launching a rebellion in 1916—agreed upon with Germany before the Great War began—even as the 16^th (Irish) Division at Hulluch was being gassed by the Germans; far too friendly with the Third Reich; striking hands with every global threat from the Soviets to Gaddafi to Arafat to the ayatollahs; and mired in immemorial Jew-hatred: has been such a stinking disgrace that I’m ashamed (and angry) to share any ancestry at all with anyone in the whole of that damned Republic.

So, Yes: Happy S Patrick’s Day. Thank God he was what we’d now call Welsh or Cumbrian.