Is it where you’re born that makes you Irish?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The Arsenal midfielder Jack Wiltshire may not be internationally recognised as one of life’s great philosophers, but his recent insistence that only English-born footballers should be entitled to play for England did prompt a slightly different question closer to home – do you have to be Irish to be Irish?

In simple terms, are Irish people only those born in Ireland or are they also the 50 million or more worldwide who make up what we know as the Irish Diaspora – or are they also those who choose to make their home and their lives here?

We’re happy to claim the sons and daughters of emigrants when it comes to events like the Gathering or the Global Irish Economic Forum, and rightly so; they consider themselves Irish and they were brought up with their Irish heritage, so who are we to take that away from them?

We’re not quite as unanimous when it comes to conferring Irishness on those who come to live here. Our own forefathers may have been the prototype of the economic migrant, but we’re slow to return the favour.

So what makes you Irish then? Birth, for sure – if you’re born here, you’re Irish by birth. And that includes the children born to refugees or asylum seekers or migrants from any part of the planet.

The simple truth is that, if you go back far enough, very few of us were Irish. For a start, you can forget those with Viking or Norman heritage – and the planters may have been bequeathed the land, but they cannot claim the roots.

St Patrick was a Welsh man, Dev was either Spanish or American and half our international soccer team wouldn’t have been able to find the place on a map prior to their call-up.

And yet these Plastic Paddies played key, if different, roles in our history. One rid the country of snakes – although the party founded by Dev produced a few of them over the subsequent decades – and the Anglo lads, led by Big Jack the Geordie, became the quintessential Boys in Green, after a Scotsman in an Irish shirt but the ball in the back of the English net.

If we were to take a narrow definition of the Irish, wouldn’t half of Galway and Connemara lose out with that colouring that owes everything to the Spanish Armada?

Are those who descended from the hundreds of thousands who left on coffin ships during Famine times any less Irish that those who stayed?

Haven’t we just spent a year selling this notion of Irishness to the world, inviting them all home for a Gathering so that they could find their roots?

Would we deny the right to Irishness to those yet to be born – in Sydney or Boston or Toronto – whose parents still haven’t met each other but who have all been forced out of their homeland by the greed of some and the criminal indifference of those we elected to watch them?

Albert Reynolds had his own take on what it took to be Irish during his time in office – it took around one million old Irish pounds stuck into an Irish bank account and then you could get yourself a legitimate Irish passport.

So Tony Cascarino wasn’t the first non-Irishman to get an Irish passport – only he at least lifted our spirits the odd time on the pitch we should still call Lansdowne Road.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.