My name is from Poland; my father was a Jew from the Czech Republic; my accent is from England. My Irishness is the result of an accident of birth (in my mother's hometown of Ballymena, County Antrim) followed by a passionate and lifelong attachment. Ever since I was a book-devouring small boy growing up in a dull south London suburb, I have wanted to be Irish.
I am not blind to the violence, dishonesty, greed and hypocrisy of much of Irish life. After declaring his pride in his nation, Shaw goes on to point out, quite rationally, that "if you put an Irishman on a spit, you will always find another Irishman to baste him". But I have found a sense of community on this island, and an acceptance and generosity from its people, that is a real gift in the soulless, self-obsessed, money-driven late capitalist world that passes for Western civilisation. I hope with all my heart that the new prosperity of the Celtic Tiger economy - in effect, the belated arrival of that late capitalist world in Ireland - will not completely drive out the old communal and humanistic values of the meitheal.