J.M. Redmond makes a fair point when he says (Letters, Friday) that if immigrants here are the "new Irish", as they are now widely described, Irish emigrants in London must be the "new English". Logical as this sounds, however, it is also unthinkable, writes Frank McNally.
The Irish genius for assimilating other cultures is matched only by a genius for avoiding assimilation overseas. Resistance rates vary, of course, with the highest rate probably occurring among Donegal-born emigrants to Glasgow. The Republic of Ireland's soccer panel has been enriched recently by talented Scottish youngsters declaring for us because of sentimental attachment to the land of their grandfathers, and nobody here is complaining.
Some of the English-born players who signed up during the Charlton years may have been more calculating. But they were no less welcome, and to question their Irishness would have been considered unpatriotic. They were a small pay-back for the historic injustice of forced emigration, after all. And if the flow of players has dried up a bit, the feeling hasn't.
Hands up the football fans among you who believe (like me) that Wayne Rooney is one of ours, if only we could have got to him in time. This is an example of a great Irish national treasure: the Double Standard. Now that the Gold Standard has been abandoned, in fact, the Double Standard should be enshrined in the form of a legal deed and installed for safe-keeping in the vaults of the Central Bank. For it underpins a number of key Irish values that would otherwise be inexplicable to ourselves, never mind to visitors.
The National Double Standard (NDS) explains the contradictions in our attitudes to everything from the licensing laws to road signs. I have not yet been able to substantiate rumours of pubs in which customers interrupt their illegal late-night drinking to go outside and smoke in accordance with the law. So for the moment, the greatest expression of the NDS remains that golden era - only recently passed - when we still had all our distance road-signs in kilometres and all the speed limits in miles.
More generally, the NDS is also what allows us to bridle whenever the term "British" is appended to anyone remotely connected with this country, even as we throw the word "Irish" around, indiscriminately, like snuff at a wake. Our enthusiasm for describing people as Irish, regardless of birthplace, embraces everyone from Peter O'Toole to 40 per cent of the entire US population. Once you distinguish yourself in any walk of life, no number of generations removed from this island is too many for you to be reclaimed.
As it happens, I have a practical problem with using the term "new Irish" for recent non-tourist arrivals. Namely that this description is more urgently needed for a section of the indigenous population. Surely the "new Irish" should be reserved for those people now queuing for limited-edition Hermes handbags, or driving top-of-the-range SUVs, or buying third properties in Bulgaria, etc. That's most of us, apparently. Even so, it would still be useful to differentiate between who we are now and who we were 15 years ago, if only to remind us that we knew ourselves when we didn't have an arse in our trousers.
On the other hand, if we are not to use the description "new Irish" for immigrants, what else do we call them? The term "new English" reminds us that, historically, a sub-section of the population here was called the "Old English" (who eventually rebelled against the new English and were fully assimilated in time, becoming - famously - "more Irish than the Irish themselves"). But of course the new Irish of the 21st century are far too diverse for any one label, ranging as they do from Albania to Zanzibar.
The phrase "more Irish than the Irish themselves" suggests that there has always been a competitive element to Irishness, which is of course true. Birth on this island does not necessarily confer an advantage in this competition. A famous example was the actor Micheál MacLiammóir, who would have won first prize in any Irishness tournament, even though his real name was Alfred Willmore and he didn't come here until his 20s.
Last year in this paper, I jocosely suggested an Irish equivalent of the British citizenship test, with multiple-choice questions calculated to expose unfamiliarity with the culture. (Sample question: What, in the opinion of all true Hibernians, did Parnell die of? (a) Rheumatic fever (b) A Broken heart. (c) Neither - he died of a Tuesday.)* But the problem with any such an exam is that many who already have citizenship might fail.
Such a system would also be too much like the driving test. People who hadn't got their full licences - as it were - would be described as "Provisional" Irish. And of course that would open up another can of worms. Soon you'd have a group calling itself the "Real Irish" (confined to fáinne-wearers with at least three All-Ireland hurling medals and a wolfhound). And then there would be the "Continuity Irish", which would have a membership of one in every town: the guy who thinks he's the only man in the country who hasn't lost the run of himself yet.
*The correct answer is (c).