Plastic Paddies are authentic Irishman – and they have a cert to prove it

So Tom Cruise is officially an Oirishman – begorrah and bejaysus but don’t that just bate Banagher; we can finally lay claim to a real Irish Hollywood leprechaun in our midst.

That’s Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, to give him his real name – one of the Mapothers who presumably played minor hurling for Mooncoin – the revelation of whose roots couldn’t have come at a better time just as he jetted into town to promote his latest movie and regain his tattered reputation last week.

Better still, he’s not just any old Irishman, because his forefathers came here with Strongbow. That’s the Anglo-Norman Strongbow, as opposed to a man who delivers cider to pubs.

This broadening definition of Irishness has served us well in the past of course; Albert Reynolds used to make Irishmen out of any Arab who had a million to invest here – but we’ve moved in since that, because now you just have to be famous, say ‘top o’ the mornin’ to ya’ and take a sip off the head of a pint of stout.

How ironic it is that soon we’ll be overrun with newly unearthed Irish descendents from all corners of the world, while actual Irishmen and women have to emigrate because there’s nothing left for them in the land where they were actually born.

Already, we can lay claim to more American Presidents than they’ve produced themselves – JFK had direct lineage, but now Barack Obama is Irish and both Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan found fifth or sixth cousins in land of the little potato and deepest darkest Cavan respectively.

We didn’t even worry about it when it turned out that Bill isn’t even a Clinton.

In retrospect, it’s our own fault for droning on and on about the Diaspora, and this conceited notion that there are really only two kinds of people in the world – those who are Irish and those who wish they were Irish.

What we don’t seem to realise is that the rest of the world thinks that Irish people all look like Darby O’Gill and they keep little people at the bottom of their garden. Ask a foreigner what they know about us, and they’; tell you we drink Guinness and spawned Bono, which isn’t a lot to be smug about.

They no more see Barack Obama as Irish than they believe the moon as made of cheese; it’s just a bit of craic that works well for politicians in an election year and gives a leg-up to some other small Irish village which can then open a museum with scraps of paper that were once touched by a famous man.

And it’s not just the Yanks we’re fooling with this ruse – FIFA fell for it too when we claimed Tony Cascarino as one of ours because he’d once owned an Irish wolfhound.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.