Really? I would have thought of "lace-curtain Irish" as being crushingly respectable *working-class* Irish people. Lace curtains wouldn't really be a Protestant thing at all at all!

The American term I love is "Two T Irish", for Irish people who have made it and built the big house with *two toilets*!

In terms of different complexions in different parts of the country, this is to some extent true; I astonished a lad a few months ago by asking was he from Donegal. "No," he said, "but my parents were. How did you know?"

How I knew was his characteristic Donegal colouring: dramatically pale skin, black, black curly hair, long black eyelashes and fine soot-black eyebrows, and very pale grey eyes.

Then in Connemara you have a mixture of the typical American picture of an Irish person - red hair, white skin, green or blue eyes - and what Irish people take as typical - very dark brown hair, pale skin, rosy cheeks, blue or grey eyes - and the dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed, Spanish-looking people. Lots of these in West Cork too. In Waterford, and parts of Dublin where the Vikings particularly settled - Ringsend, for instance, you'll find long-eyed, high-cheekboned people with "nut-brown" hair, the colour of a walnut shell.

But yes, generally it's pretty much of a mixture.

And getting more so now, I'm glad to say, with the influx of beautiful dark-black and rich-brown and coffee-coloured people from Africa, tan people from the Arab countries and golden people from China.