Can’t say that I’m Irish at all, but I did have one family branch that lived in Ireland for a generation or so, several hundred years ago. They were originally French Protestants that fled after the St. Bartholemew’s Day massacre. Ended up in Ireland, in a town in the north named Carrickfergus. Sailed from Belfast in 1722, came to Conneticut. One son, during the Revolutionary War, got court-martialed because he wouldn’t fight with the French soldiers that were sent over, they being Catholic and all. Later he was pardoned though. So I’m not Irish in the least(most of my genes came from Germany, or central Europe anyway) but I do have a distant Irish connection.
This could be considered a controversial opinion, but I wouldn’t consider grandparents a good indication of what “nationality” you are. Maybe your parents at a push, but really it’s where you’re from that defines you. I live in Ireland, I have an Irish wife, one of my grandfathers was Irish, but I’m as English as they come. IMO if you grew up in New Jersey with 4 Irish grandparents and a shillelagh in the hall, you’re still as American as apple pie.
Twisty is lying though. He’s as Irish as Lord of the Dance.
You would be amazed how much names are still associated with particular parts of Ireland, even with all the mobility and upheaval of the last few centuries.
As for my roots, all my ancestors are Irish as far as I know, so I’m Celtic to the core.
Well, it’s a dialect difference. Obviously the nationality of (most of) the above posters isn’t Irish, but in American English a word like “Irish” or “Italian” or whatever is perfectly acceptable to use to describe one’s ethnicity (or ancestry, if you prefer) as well. This bothers a lot of Europeans, but shrug. I do find it a mite annoying when Americans suggest that their ancestry alone makes them an expert on the current affairs of their ancestral land (and Irish-Americans tend to be the worst offenders in this regard), but I see nothing wrong with claiming and celebrating that ancestry.
All that said, I do know plenty of people who were born in England to Irish parents and were raised as Irish themselves (I know “raised as Irish” might not seem to make much sense but there’s not really any other way I can put it). These people all consider themselves Irish, not English, and if you spend ten minutes talking to them you realise they are quite different from your average English person. I probably wouldn’t consider them fully Irish but I wouldn’t call them fully English either. Being born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse, as they say.
(I live in Ireland, but I’m not Irish - yet. Some Ulster Scots ancestry, but no Gaelic Irish that I know of, unless you want to go back a couple thousand years to when the Scottish Gaels were still in Ireland.)
BTW Hickory6, Lynch is a Galway name.
Like ruadh said, this is basically an American thing. We’re still a pretty new country, relatively speaking. There aren’t many buildings here that are older than a century or two, especially when you move away from the Eastern seaboard. It’s not like living in, say, London, or Paris, where you can walk down streets that were laid down more than a thousand years ago and know that your umpty-great-grandfather once walked down the exact same street. We’re pretty rootless over here, so a lot of us cling to whatever old world culture our most recent immigrant ancestors came from, to give us more of a sense of history.
Still, it’s important to realize that Americans who identify themselves as Irish (or French, or Italian, or whatever) don’t usually see that identification as detracting from their Americaness. In fact, I think most people feel it highlights it, by drawing attention to the multicultural nature of America, and the fact that it was founded by people from all over the world.
And like everything else in America, I suspect we will be exporting this attitude. As national borders become more and more porous, and more people pull up roots and move to other countries, they are going to carry their ethnic alliegences with them, if not their national ones. I don’t think it will be too long before we seeing people identifying themselves as Pakistani-English, or Egyptian-Italian, because their grandparents left their ancestral homes and moved somewhere else looking for a better life, and their descendents want to remember and celebrate their old homelands.
I think there already are people identifying themselves as Pakistani-English, and certainly a lot of white English people see these folks as Pakistani even if they were born and raised in Walthamstow. I have to point this out to European people whenever they complain about second-generation Americans calling themselves “Irish” - at least in America pretty much everyone gets designated by their ethnic heritage, we don’t just single out the nonwhites the way they frequently do over here.
As far as I can tell so far (haven’t had the time for digging into my father’s bloodlines, bastard child that I am), the last century any ancestors of mine lived in Ireland was in the 19th century. One, a James Dillon, was allegedly a bare-fisted boxer in Londonderry in the early to mid 19th century. I have Tynan ancestors who were apparently transplanted into Ayrshire, Scotland, prior to the mid 19th century.
And then there’s the London policeman of Irish heritage, so it’s told, who may or may not have been my grandfather … Eh. I’m an odd mix, t’ tell th’ truth.
I have been thinking about the dialect thing, and I realise it’s correct.
Well, apparently, there are only two types of people anyway…
Those that are Irish, and those that want to be.
“Post about your roots here!”
I’m so pleased to open this thread and find nary a potato pun.
Oops.
All I ever found of Irish in my ancestry were a couple of 17th gentlemen. Henry Tandy and Donnock Dennis. Which makes me 0.1708984375%. Oh, if you do the math you might see I come up short of my amazing 0.17%. That’s because there’s strong evidence that Donnock is up there twice.
I’m of 3/4 Irish ancestry, the rest being German and Swiss.
My grandmother’s grandfather Patrick Coleman came over in the 1840’s as a refugee from the Great Famine and settled in New York. As soon as the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the UNion Army. In 1864 he was captured at Petersburg and send to the infamous Andersonville prison camp, where he died of starvation. It’s supremely ironic to me that someone who fled the famine met such a fate in his adopted country.
My mother is Irish to the core, her maiden name being Rosie O’Rourke and her mother’s name being Mary McNamara. Her grandparents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1870s. She never knew much about them, since her father never spoke about his parents.
Some years ago I started doing research and we located my great-grandfather’s grave in a NY cemetery. To our great surprise, we found that seven people were buried there, four adults and three children. As it turned out, my grandfather’s father had died when he was six, and his mother when he was 11. The other people in the grave were his aunt, his uncle, two sisters and a cousin, all of whom had died in the space of six years. It became obvious why my grandfather never spoke of his childhood. We still don’t know who raised him after he was orphaned. It really brought home to me how hard conditions were for the Irish immigrants at that time.
Despite my very Irish name (Brian Patrick McCarty), I’m only 1/8 Irish. McCarthy is one of the “big names” in Ireland, and most people say McCarty is short for that.
My Great Great Grandfather married Margeret Tobin of Whiddy Island.
One of his sons was at one time the largest grower of Pineaples in the world.
Another son (my G.Grandfather) was mayor of Kaukauna, WI
Brian
useless McCarty trivia mode
100% 
My father came over to San Francisco from Cork, and Mom came from Donegal. Both families are still well established in Ireland, and I have more cousins than I can count!
Heh, I can do better than that. My mom has over one hundred first cousins. Needless to say, that side of the family is very, very, very Catholic.
I just got some Irish in me yesterday!
My daughter is 50% Azari and 50% Irish. What a lovely combination.
:cringes:
Gah, that was crass.
Mate, people have been identifying themselves as Pakistani-English for decades! Curry is our national dish!
I’m more Irish than Twisty because I can claim to be a descendent of the last High King of Ireland.
Pergau (3,499,950th in line for the throne)
Yeah?well My ancestors were selling strips of plaster at the Battle of Clontarf.