Do you have to be ethnically Irish to be considered Irish?

atilladehun wrote: »

Where do you draw the line. The gang that settled in mount sandel could consider anyone who arrived after them a bunch of foreign invaders.

The Celts that lived here (invaders to the ancients who created many of our ancient structures) had a broad DNA diversity, that's before the Vikings and Norman's.

For a start "Celts" is a bit of a historical and genetic misnomer and covers a large swathe of Europe, with similar enough cultures, but quite a wide genetic diversity. "Celts" didn't come here in any numbers, or at least few enough that they left zero trace in the genes of native Irish people. Vikings and Normans(who were basically the same peoples, with some northern French in the latter) had much more of an impact on the Irish genetics, but even here today not as much as is commonly expected.

Those invading rulers are the ones that named the place Ireland and considered all the island inhabitants Irish.

Actually the place had many names, pretty much all of which we know of were given by outsiders; Hibernia, Scotia, Iournia(SP), which then could be used internally. Eire which gave us Ireland was a goddess IIRC and only recorded in the medieval, though it may have a much older root. And the idea of a nation state like we think of them today was extremely fluid back then. It may have been called Hibernia or whatever, but not so much in the way we would consider it today. The Irish themselves thought far more clannishly(big shock) and were more about family, local area, province, rather than the island as a whole entity under one rule. That said those that travelled overseas, missionaries and the like were quite clear about the fact that they were Scotti or Eriugena(Irish born), as were those who spoke of them. For a Frank to claim he was Eriugena or vice versa would have been a WTF? moment.

This is pretty much the case all over the world.

Actually most populations around the Old World remain remarkably and surprisingly stable over time, even through periods of invasion and conquest, which is how the vast majority of cases of various cultures came together

Celebrating cultures through arts, language and characteristics can be great and bring people together. Everyone is invited.

Making people feel like 'other' is a crappy waste of everyone's time.

Sounds fantastic in theory, but again the breadth of human history shows us that disparate cultures rarely come together peacefully, or peacefully for long anyway. Where actual multicultural societies existed they did so under overarching imperial powers who were quite strict about too much coming together of cultures, especially "alien" ones.

As for Irish genetics and this "broad diversity" you speak of(Vikings were pretty narrow genetically too btw).

Earlier post wrote: »

Is ethnically Japanese a thing? Ethnically Persian? Ethnically Native American? Ethnically Congolese? With the exception of the Japanese, the rest would have had more back and forth and mixtures going on in their pasts than the Irish population. Here's an article from the Journal on the genetics of Ireland.

One of this study's authors says this:

For one, Irish people are, to a large degree, distinctly Irish.

Professor Gianpiero Cavalleri, who helped to devise the study, told TheJournal.ie: “In terms of the genetic diversity for Irish people, there’s actually very little. And the diversity we do see is very subtle.”



Compare the Irish population to England. More mixing going on in the latter. Our genes can even be narrowed down to provinces(and family names) within Ireland.