Interesting email from an Irish fellow about Irish kilts.

[Big Mikey]

Hey Al, no worries. I think that fellow falls into the farts and opinions category........you know what I mean: sooner or later every a*****e lets one out!!

[cessna152towser]

Fair do's that the Irish county tartans aren't authentic - no doubt they were designed to be marketted to people like myself who are of Scots and Irish descent and want to wear a kilt which marks the Irish side of their ancestry.
I've always associated Irish kilts with being either saffron or bottle green.
I wore my County Armagh tartan kilt to visit realtives in Portadown, County Armagh earlier this month. Quite a few people in Portadown asked about the kilt, but none of them recognised the tartan as being named for their home county.
I didn't see any other men in kilts either in Portadown or while travelling there via Dublin, but nobody laughed at the kilt either, even in Dublin where many schools have adopted tartans as part of their uniform resulting in there being lots of schoolgirls to be seen wearing tartan kilted skirts.
My Irish born friend who now lives in Scotland and who joined me for part of the trip said he would be looking into acquiring a kilt in County Wexford tartan to honour his own heritage.

[Mr. Kilt]

Thanks guys.

I received a reply from him last night. I won't post it here, he goes on a bit of a rant and it wouldn't be appropriate for the group.

He's fairly young (early 20's would be my guess) and he is VERY passionate about what he feels is right. Oh well. Like Big Mikey said...

[Sir Robert]

Irish Nationalists in 1916 saw the pan-Celtic kilt as being more Irish than the pan-Saxon pants and adopted the kilt for themselves and as a uniform for schoolboys. So if I have this right, a guy in Ohio does not think kilts are Irish but the founders of the Irish Free State did, which one is right?

[kallen]

So according to this dude...I, as a person of Irish descent. Should totally be "not Irish". Never go to Ireland, and Never celebrate Irish anything.

Ok, being a person of German descent as well, do the same things apply? No, I'm not going to celebrate the Hitler era obviously and wear liederhosen, but I can't celebrate my German heritage either(not that I really do)

My son(who will be here in Oct.) will basically be 1/3 Irish, 1/3 German, 1/3 Mexican. So, according to this dude, he won't be able to celebrate ANY of his heritages. If he wants to be a kilt wearing Luchador, he is totally being a "plastic krout/mc/spick" and should be laughed/shuned at???

How does he feel about blacks who parade around in there "african" heritage stuff??? Italians??? Japanese???

I think this dude falls into the "American hating/enterprising maggot" feeding off of something he hates, and whining about it all the way to the bank.

[Riverkilt]

On a general level, a man who choses to move to another culture/country and when he arrives loudly declares that the other culture/country is "doing it wrong" is a fool...or in his cups.

Ron

[MrAcheson]

My son(who will be here in Oct.) will basically be 1/3 Irish, 1/3 German, 1/3 Mexican.

Your son's genealogy breaks down in thirds? How the heck did you conceive him in the first place?

My dad's side of the family is mostly Scottish and German. My mom's is mostly English and Irish. I guess that makes me all American. But I still wear a kilt to the highland games and I'll probably buy a SWK Green Heavyweight for St. Paddy's despite what this guy says.

[arrScott]

The letter-writer is certainly correct, at least from a certain very limited point of view.

But culture is what people do. That's all. "Irish culture" is nothing more than what Irish people do. So any understanding of Irish culture depends first and foremost on defining what is an Irish person. The writer in effect argues that only people born and currently living in Ireland are Irish, so only their culture is "real" Irish culture.

But for every person of Irish descent living in Ireland, there are seven people of primarily Irish descent living in the United States. Irish-Americans have long maintained some distinctive cultural traditions in the United States. Maybe it would be more proper to call this "Irish-American culture" than "Irish culture," but the sense of "Irishness" remains quite strong among Irish-Americans. The boisterous, not-true-to-the-homeland celebration of St. Patrick's day dates back to before American Independence. I just read a diary snippet from a Union soldier who described the start of the federal march on Manassas in 1861 as "like a thousand Saint Patrick's Day picnics, without the lemonade."

Which is to say, the popular celebration of St. Patrick's Day in America is actually an older tradition than Irish independence from Britain -- older, in fact, than the modern Irish nationalist movement that led to independence. Along with a number of other things, it's a distinctively American flavor of Irish culture. But that doesn't make it fake or plastic or inauthentic. It's a real cultural heritage that informs the lives of about 44 million Irish-Americans.

So if Irish-Americans wear kilts, then the wearing of kilts is an authentic part of Irish culture in America. Since there are 44 million of us here, and only 6 million people of Irish descent left in Ireland, who is to say which is the "real" Irish culture, if only one can be?

[Mr. MacDougall]

Since there are 44 million of us here, and only 6 million people of Irish descent left in Ireland, who is to say which is the "real" Irish culture, if only one can be?

Something about this part of your statement makes me uncomfortable. Is culture a numbers game? Is it about geography? Is it about genetics?

I think part of my problem is that I, personally, am a mutt. My maternal grand-father came from Germany, so I'm a quarter German. My maternal grandmother was Scots / Cherokee / French / Dutch, so I've got splashes of all of those. My paternal grandmother came from Ireland, so I'm a quarter Irish. My paternal grandfather was Danish / English / Dutch / Greek. So what am I? My answer has always been "an American," but it seems like a lot of people don't want to accept that as an answer.

Most of us who are Americans, whose families have been here for more than a generation, can hardly point to one area of the world from which our ancestors came. Most of mine at least came from Europe; I have friends whose ancestors, while as varried as mine, came mostly from Asia, or Africa. What are they, if not American?

Of the 44 million Irish descendants you quoted, how many have more than a thread of Irish in their cultural heritage? I'm 1/4 Irish, which, as I understand it, means that I could apply for Irish citizenship currently. But I would never claim that I have a better understanding of what it means to be Irish than someone who actually lives in Ireland, even if I and my distant cousins here in America out-number the distant cousins who live in Ireland.

I think the best solution is to say, "this is an Irish-influenced part of an American sub-culture," and let it go at that.

[arrScott]

Something about this part of your statement makes me uncomfortable. Is culture a numbers game? Is it about geography? Is it about genetics?

My point was that it's not a numbers game, and it's not a geography game. The only "real" culture is what real people actually do. The "Irish" traditions of Irish-Americans are no more or less authentic than the "Irish" traditions of people who live in Ireland. Sure, there's a lot of counterfactual nostalgia in the Irish-American sense of Irish-ness, but there's also a lot of deliberate artificiality in the Irish sense of Irish-ness, too. I mean, the potato is a Peruvian crop brought to Ireland by Spanish sailors. So are all the potato dishes I was served in Ireland not really Irish? Does the shepherd's pie I saw on the menu make the pubs I visited in County Kerry really Peruvian pubs or Spanish pubs, not Irish establishments? Of course not. That's a silly way to think of culture, but it's what the original emailer would have us do.

I'm 1/4 Irish, which, as I understand it, means that I could apply for Irish citizenship currently.

Under Irish law, you need to have at least one grandparent who was born in Ireland or who was an Irish national to be eligible for citizenship. I'm about half Irish by ancestry -- my mom's side -- but since the last direct ancestors to come over did so in the 1870s, I won't be getting that EU passport.

It took me a few days to look it up, but the original email talking about plastic Paddies and whatnot reminded me of an old Hawaiian saying I came across once. When a Hawaiian was embarrassed by or ignorant of traditional Hawaiian culture, he was said to be "he Hawai'i 'uwala Kahiki." Or, in English, "An Irish-potato Hawaiian."

Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind being an Irish-potato Hawaiian!