[the scotsman]

You have missed my point.

Yes, it does have relevance, as such history should always be a guard against the calcification of national and cultural identity into rigid identities, identities which seek a religious, cultural or nationalistic purity. Think I am exaggerating?. Remember that modern Catholic Irish identity comes a great deal from narrowminded men like O’ Donnell, who saw Irishness and Irish identity PURELY in terms of Catholicism. That leads to the idea that the Protestants in Ireland cannot ever ‘really’ be Irish, even after 405 years.....

It is a noxious idea at best and a dangerous one at worst.

My point was that the ‘native’ Irish are the descendants of men and women who oppressed, subjugated and conquered. When talk in our times of oppression leads to the car bomb, the Armalite and decades of terrorism, decades of killing, suffering and heartache, then its is recumbant upon us to use that history to topple those who would sit on their ivory nationalistic tower and press buttons to set off car bombs from it.

[Gluteus Maximus]

I'm sure that the genes of whomever the Celts, Vikings, Norman-Welsh etc. conquered still predominate among the Irish. These are cultural transformations; they are not primarily a matter of blood, as it were. Actually, I read recently that about 75% of the ancestors of the English are the pre-Celtic, late-stone-age inhabitants. The waves of conquerors left their mark, to be sure, but they didn't supplant the original gene pool. They did, however, establish a new ethnic identity.

My point is that as things now stand, the ethnic identities "British" and "Irish" are mutually exclusive. One cannot be both, at least in the mind of the (I would think rather large) majority of the Island's inhabitants. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing, maybe it's neither, and maybe it'll change. I'm just saying that's the way it is now.