The Stan Rogers song Charmion posted certainly reflects the attitude of our father. When as a teenager I asked him why he did not wear a green tie on St. Patrick's Day, he opined that if he were to mark it sartorially he would wear a black tie.

His first Swiss mercenary ancestor arrived in Lower Canada in the 1790s married to an O'Connor, the daughter of a British Army surgeon, so presumably someone who had the terms of the Test Acts, i.e. a Protestant. In 1849, their son was accused of being Irish in _Le Canadien_: « une variété non encore décrite de l'espèce et qui appartient à aucune nation et nous croyons en partie... » (the elipsis likely stands in for something actionable because the man they were trying to insult was a lawyer). That son married a McGrath, whose father had arrived in Newfoundland from Waterford in 1822.

When my father and his elder brothers found themselves at school in England in the 1920s and '30s, they were bullied in the best English schoolboy fashion for being Irish, and it was a fair cop, by their standards.

Our mother's father, despite bearing the name "Harris," was Montreal Irish, his grandfather having arrived in the 1820s from, I believe, Sligo. He and his brother are identified as "Irish" on the 1891 census, even though they were born in Canada. I asked our grandmother if they were from Griffintown, an Irish working class neighbourhood. She was aghast (her inlaws were lace curtain Irish and she had the furniture to prove it).

We descend from Irishmen on both sides of the family, but I do not feel a strong connection. My experience serving with members of the Irish Free Clothing Society (their armed forces) on UN duty convinced me I had little in common.