Perhaps oppressed by the sheer weight of responsibility involved in being Irish, the rest of us sometimes struggle to match the enthusiasm of part-time practitioners. Photograph: Getty Images
There was an interesting problem on the Daily Telegraph’s agony aunt page the other day, in which a concerned mother in London worried that her teenage son was turning “Irish”.
His condition should have been foreseeable. The mother herself was half Irish, on her father’s side, so the teenager was in high-risk group for developing symptoms. But now he had started using the Irish version of his name and making critical comments about “the British”, both of which habits were said to “irritate his [English] dad”.
The letter was headlined: “Could my son’s fixation with his Irish
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