The ten worst Irish accents in cinema history? Check ’em out here. Amazingly, Tom Cruise doesn’t take the top spot…
So, yeah, Happy St Patrick’s Day. Time then, to dust off this unnecessarily dyspeptic take from a few years ago:
When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian Brigadoon was a sham, a mockery, a Shamrockery of real Ireland and a remarkable exhibition of plastic paddyness. But at least it was confined to the Irish abroad and those foreigners desperate to find some trace of green in their blood.
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