"The Irish American tag has always amused me. Why choose one relative from generations ago and claim to be whatever they were actually born? What about all the other relatives born elsewhere."

Dave's Wife probably addressed this sufficiently, but let me reiterate:

Those who identify as "Irish-American" do NOT generally include folks who need to go back further than one or two generations to find an Irish-born ancestor, and in most cases there are precious few "relatives born elsewhere" ~ sometimes none.

One St. Patrick's Day morning quite a few years ago, I heard Bryant Gumbel on the Today Show provide the statistic that some surprisingly large percentage of "Americans of Irish descent" ~ 70-75%, perhaps ~ are Protestant, rather than Catholic.

Thinking about that for a while, I realized that the statistician was accounting for "Scotch-Irish" (the descendants of Ulster Presbyterians) along with the Gaelic/Catholic variety of Irish-American.

Men from Ulster constituted a very large number of the earliest English-speaking settlers of North America, many of them indentured servants who were shipped to Georgia and the Carolinas. Still, today, the white population of the American South is of predominantly Scotch-Irish descent.

Because the original Scotch-Irish arrived so very long ago, they have had quite a few generations to multiply, resulting in significantly greater numbers than descendants of the much-later-arriving "native" Irish. The descendants of the Ulstermen have also had a much longer time to forget their nationality-of-descent and identify as "unhyphenated" Americans. These people do NOT generally think of themselves as "Irish-American," do NOT celebrate Irish folk music and folk culture, and while they may be as likely as any other American to use Paddy's Day as an excuse to drink, they do NOT generally organize St. Patrick's Day parades and other such activities. And they're not Catholics; indeed, a few may still harbor rabid, KKK-type anti-Catholic sentiments.

And, since they've been hereabouts for so very long and have never affiliated themselves with a religion once considered alien to mainstream America, they've produced a good number of American Presidents, dating all the way back to Andrew Jackson.

I find it interesting that the Scots/Protestant population of Ulster which provided so many very-early American settlers had not been in Ireland for very long at all. It was only a generation or two earlier that their fathers and mothers were uprooted from Scotland and assigned to the Ulster "plantations" confiscated from the original inhabitants who had been consigned "to hell or Connaught." Nevertheless, the sons and grandsons who were themselves uprooted shortly afterwards for the trip across the Atlantic considered themselves Irish (or "Scotch-Irish"), not simply "Scottish" or "Scots."

I suppose there's somewthing about Ireland that just makes people want to be Irish. Even centuries ago, it was often observed that new arrivals in Ireland, including even conquerors like the Norman knoghts and the Vikings, characteristically tried to make themselves become "more Irish than the Irish themsleves."

The humorist Roy Blount once wrote that the cultural heritage of the American South, and of rural America in general, is "not Anglo-Saxon, but Afro-Celtic." He was underscoring how the vast majority of Southern white folks are of Scottish and/or Irish decent ~ not predominantly English, as many people assume ~ and also acknowledging the influence of African culture even in areas where people of African descent suffered the worst forms of discrimination.

Speaking for myself, two of my grandparents (my dad's parents) were born in Ireland, and my other grandfather was born in the US very shortly after his parents had come from Ireland. My maternal grandmother, the only one of four who lived long enough for me to know very well, was not Irish, but she was yet another immigrant to the US ~ from Alsace, on the border between France and Germany.

That recent family history allows me to consider myself "Irish-American," and I would hope anyone can understand that it's a legitimate identification that does not depend upon "choos[ing] one relative from generations ago" or ignoring "all the other relatives born elsewhere."

(I would add that most of my peers and schoolmates growing up were also grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants, not only from Ireland, but also from Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary, etc. If we all might not have identified strongly with our respective "nationalities," every one of us certainly had close relatives who did feel a strong attachment to one "mother country" or another.)

Having a grandparent born in Ireland, by the way, allows a person to move to Ireland and claim Irish citizenship. As I understand it, this can be done withouttwo qualifying grandparents, I've certainly thought about it. I'm glad that, as an Irish-American, I have this option (if only as something about which to daydream).