Modern Irish monarchy

Thande

Donor
No, Ireland was independent. It would just mean the end of the personal union. Could the Nazis have used this in anyway to bring Ireland into their camp?
Nah. Edward VIII might have admired the Nazis a bit but he wouldn't have fought Britain, and the Irish would have known it was suicide. Why throw away your independence after you've only just won it?

OTOH, if Hitler goes mad(der) and tries Operation Green, things would get interesting (in the Chinese sense).
 

VT45

Banned
Nah. Edward VIII might have admired the Nazis a bit but he wouldn't have fought Britain, and the Irish would have known it was suicide. Why throw away your independence after you've only just won it?

OTOH, if Hitler goes mad(der) and tries Operation Green, things would get interesting (in the Chinese sense).

Operation Green? Is that Sealion for Ireland?
 

Thande

Donor
Operation Green? Is that Sealion for Ireland?

Yeah. I think someone did a TL about it on ChangingTheTimes. Farfetched of course, because he wanted to do something interesting rather than lots of Rhine barges sunk in the English Channel, so the German troops do get to Ireland even though that would be even harder than Sealion.
 
My dad went to school with one of the last direct descendants of the last High King. He later became a priest. He is said to have been anice guy.
 
Which will be particularly ironic considering there are only four million real Irishmen and -women for them to rule over :rolleyes: :D

Well, it is true that there are far more people in the USA with at least some Irish ancestry than in Ireland itself - over 35 million according to self-reporting, though this might be overstated and probably counts quite a few people who have only a small amount of Irish ancestry (one Irish great-grandparent or something to that effect.) The number of people in the USA who are 100% Irish may well be lower than in Ireland itself.
 

Thande

Donor
The number of people in the USA who are 100% Irish may well be lower than in Ireland itself.

Er...yes.

But I doubt anyone in Ireland is 100% Irish (whatever that means), never mind the US or anyone else.

Remember there were at least three different ethnic groups in Ireland even before the Roman invasion of Britain, so trying to describe your percentage of 'Irish' ancestry is fairly pointless. If you go by the 'Gaelic' definition, then that means historical Ulster isn't Irish, either.
 
Er...yes.

But I doubt anyone in Ireland is 100% Irish (whatever that means), never mind the US or anyone else.

Remember there were at least three different ethnic groups in Ireland even before the Roman invasion of Britain, so trying to describe your percentage of 'Irish' ancestry is fairly pointless. If you go by the 'Gaelic' definition, then that means historical Ulster isn't Irish, either.

In the USA at least, "Irish" tends to mean Catholic and of Gaelic ancestry or at least descended from the early Anglo-Norman settlers, while "Scots-Irish" is usually used to describe the Ulster Protestants.
 

Thande

Donor
In the USA at least, "Irish" tends to mean Catholic and of Gaelic ancestry or at least descended from the early Anglo-Norman settlers, while "Scots-Irish" is usually used to describe the Ulster Protestants.
Damn you for using logic and reason! ;)

But as I say, you couldn't really justify it genetically, given the level of mixing.

Not that you can for almost anyone - as was pointed out on a recent programme, although culturally distinct, people of Angle and Danish ancestry have the same genetic markers because their ancestors were from the same region. There's more genetic variation between Norwegian and Dane than between Dane and Angle, which I thought was interesting.
 

67th Tigers

Banned
Damn you for using logic and reason! ;)

But as I say, you couldn't really justify it genetically, given the level of mixing.

Not that you can for almost anyone - as was pointed out on a recent programme, although culturally distinct, people of Angle and Danish ancestry have the same genetic markers because their ancestors were from the same region. There's more genetic variation between Norwegian and Dane than between Dane and Angle, which I thought was interesting.

It's also true that a large number of American Irish descendants who believe themselves to be of Catholic Irish descent (generally they "came over during the famine") turn out to have been Protestants/ Presbyterians of earlier import.

The numbers are in fact 70 million Americans have at least one ancestor of Irish (of any variety) ethnicity, but only 9 million of these are Catholic Irish. The 35m self reported Irish Americans apparently includes large numbers of Americans with no Irish ancestry. The number is up by 10m or so in the last couple of decades.
 

Thande

Donor
It's also true that a large number of American Irish descendants who believe themselves to be of Catholic Irish descent (generally they "came over during the famine") turn out to have been Protestants/ Presbyterians of earlier import.

The numbers are in fact 70 million Americans have at least one ancestor of Irish (of any variety) ethnicity, but only 9 million of these are Catholic Irish. The 35m self reported Irish Americans apparently includes large numbers of Americans with no Irish ancestry. The number is up by 10m or so in the last couple of decades.
Cultural effects and rebranding I suppose.

If the Know-Nothing party type catholic-ophobia had lasted longer in the USA, it might have happened the other way around, with Catholic Irish immigrants off the boat claiming to be Protestants.
 
It's also true that a large number of American Irish descendants who believe themselves to be of Catholic Irish descent (generally they "came over during the famine") turn out to have been Protestants/ Presbyterians of earlier import.

The numbers are in fact 70 million Americans have at least one ancestor of Irish (of any variety) ethnicity, but only 9 million of these are Catholic Irish. The 35m self reported Irish Americans apparently includes large numbers of Americans with no Irish ancestry. The number is up by 10m or so in the last couple of decades.

I can believe that quite a few people who have lost track of their ancestry over time could confuse (Presbyterian)"Scots-Irish" ancestors with (Catholic) Irish ones, but I very much doubt that the true number of Irish Catholics is only 9 million. There are probably more people than that in the New York City and Boston areas alone with at least a little bit of Catholic Irish ancestry than 9 million. Remember that more than 1 million Catholic Irish immigrated to the USA in just the few years after the Potato famine, so given natural rates of population increase these alone should produce more than 9 million people, and that's not counting the significant numbers who continued to come through the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

If you are referring to people who are predominantly of Irish Catholic ancestry, the 9 million might be accurate.
 
How much could a 1½ million or so immigrants breed in 160~ years, i wonder.
Anyone with a better head for number care to give it an estimate?

edit: i clicked reply around twenty minutes before posting, got distracted, and so i didn't spot the above post with the estimate.
 
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It's also true that a large number of American Irish descendants who believe themselves to be of Catholic Irish descent (generally they "came over during the famine") turn out to have been Protestants/ Presbyterians of earlier import.

The numbers are in fact 70 million Americans have at least one ancestor of Irish (of any variety) ethnicity, but only 9 million of these are Catholic Irish. The 35m self reported Irish Americans apparently includes large numbers of Americans with no Irish ancestry. The number is up by 10m or so in the last couple of decades.


somewhere around 80% of my family is Irish (and catholic), but I don't think they came over during the famine.... but there really does seem to be a lot of people who say they are too
 

67th Tigers

Banned
I thought something like over 4 million Irish immigrated to America between the famine and 1920.

Before the famine it was running at ca 20k pa, spiked at about 100k pa during the famine and then came back down again. Ca 1860 the Irish population in the USA (inc future CSA) is about 800k.
 

Thande

Donor
I thought something like over 4 million Irish immigrated to America between the famine and 1920.

There were less than 8 million people in Ireland altogether before the famine struck, so that would be rather ambitious (and see 67th Tigers' figures).
 
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