I am Irish-American (or half of me is). This is not about the people who went before, mg, this is about the people indulging in certain cultural behaviours now. I've seen the argument from several perspectives: as someone who grew up in America - and whose father worked in a Plastic Paddy pub when I was growing up; as someone who lived and worked with Irish immigrants in New Jersey and got an insight into what they felt about the "Oirification" of their culture in America; and as someone who lived and worked amongst the London Irish when I first came to England.

Firstly, there is a cheapness about the Irish stereotypes which abound in both Britain and the US. Part of their cheapness is borne of commercialism, it's true. But at the end of the day, there is a vast difference between being OF a culture, and having that culture as part of your (distant) heritage. There is a huge disconnect between indigenous cultures, which develop and evolve and constantly change, and their sentimental, tourguide depictions which are fixed in aspic. Probably there are few cultures which suffer from this more than the Irish. This is partly due to the vast numbers of people who claim Irish ancestry in America, but in my experience very few of those people have any direct or significant experience of Ireland or Irish people. In searching for some sort of cultural identity they have assimilated something which is in itself a completely false amalgam of stage Irish, Tin Pan Alley, Bing Crosby movies and troubles songs.

mg, if you are offended by the term "Plastic Paddy", you shouldn't be defending these stereotypes - you should be digging a little deeper to find out what Irish culture is really about. If you don't want to, that's fine - but don't expect anyone to take this false construct of American songs and green beer as a serious attempt at cultural engagement.

What I'm going to say now may offend some of the people on this thread - but my experiences as the descendant of an immigrant family, who became an immigrant myself, whose daughter is now the child of an immigrant family, has led me over the years to certain observations. Being Irish American - or Italian-American, or Greek-American, or whatever - is simply not the same as being Irish, or Italian or Greek. When I visit Ireland or southern Italy (the other half of my heritage), there are definitely things I recognise, which have a familiarity for me, and which resonate. But equally, being in those places underlines the fact that I am not of those people, do not belong to those cultures. To try to pretend that they belong to me in the same way that they belong to people who have spent their lives in those places, to assume an understanding and kinship because of some notional concept surrounding the blood running through my veins, is delusional at best and dishonest at worst.

I have lived around half my life in America, the other half in England. These are the two cultures I know, and understand, and which I feel belong to me, because I have lived them. It is nothing to do with the colour of the blood running through my veins (which is definitely not green) nor the colour of the beer I drink (though I did once have a green English beer that was brewed with nettles).

One point I would make is that the worst excesses of the sentimentalising (is that a word?) of very real suffering that accompanies the "Plastic Paddy" culture is what happened in America in the 80s, where gullible Americans in shamrock bars in Boston and New York and Los Angeles would thump their bodhrans and belt out Fields of Athenry and The Men Behind the Wire before chucking their money into the IRA collecting tins. That's what comes of over-romanticising a culture that you don't really understand.

"For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them."

- Somerset Maugham