Plastic Paddy

Plastic Paddy is a slang term used to describe some members of the Irish diaspora, or those with no ancestral connection to Ireland, who appropriate (often stereotypical) Irish customs and identity. A plastic Paddy may know little of actual Irish culture, but nevertheless assert an Irish identity. The term is pejoratively used to refer to people on the basis of their perceived lack of authenticity as Irish.

Usage

The name, "Paddy", is a diminutive form of Padraic ("Patrick") and, depending on context, can used either as an affectionate or a pejorative reference to an Irishman.

People who were not born in Ireland, and who did not grow up in Ireland, but nonetheless possess Irish citizenship and an Irish passport are often labelled as plastic Paddies. The term came into common use in the 1980s when it was frequently employed as a term of abuse by recently-arrived middle-class Irish migrants to London. Hickman (2002) states; it ‘became a means of distancing themselves from established Irish communities.’ And the use was a part of the process by which the second-generation Irish are positioned as inauthentic within the two identities, of Englishness and Irishness.

Ironically, both English hostility when faced with the spectre of Irish identities, and Irish denials of authenticity of those same identities, utilizes the pejorative term ‘plastic paddy’ to stereotype and undermine processes ‘of becoming’ of Irish identities of second-generation Irish people. The message from each is that second-generation Irish are ‘really English’ and many of the second-generation resist this.Hickman (2002) Irish Journal of Sociology

Usage in Ireland

The term plastic Paddy is used by the Irish media as a term for an outdated image of Ireland and Irish culture as seen and promoted by the non-Irish citizens including the Irish diaspora. Within an Irish context the term is used as a reaction to and defiance of the diaspora-based celebration and increasing commercialisation and sponsorship of St. Patrick's Day as being demeaning to the Irish. It can also be used in a derogative term for Irish people who support English football teams; while Irish journalists have used the term to describe Irish bars in Sydney, Australia with the “minimum of plastic paddy trimmings”. First generation Irish-English model Erin O'Connor was called a "plastic Paddy" in Ireland due to her parents' choice of forename and non-Irish birth despite them both being Irish citizens. The Killarney Active Retirement Association audaciously displayed a banner promising to "Chase the plastic Paddy out of Ireland" in the Kerry 2005 St Patrick's Day celebrations while chasing leprechauns away.

Britain

Mary J. Hickman writes that "plastic Paddy" was a term used to "deny and denigrate the second-generation Irish in Britain" in the 1980s, and was "frequently articulated by the new middle-class Irish immigrants in Britain, for whom it was a means of distancing themselves from established Irish communities." According to Bronwen Walter, Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, "the adoption of a hyphenated identity has been much more problematic for the second generation Irish in Britain. The Irish-born have frequently denied the authenticity of their Irish identity, using the derogatory term plastic Paddy, and the English regards them as "assimilated" and simply "English."

The term has been used to taunt non-Irish born players who choose to play for the Republic of Ireland national football team, fans of Irish teams, who are members of supporters clubs outside of Ireland, and other Irish individuals living in Great Britain. A study by the University of Strathclyde and Nil by Mouth found the term was used abusively on Celtic and Rangers supporters' Internet forums in reference to Celtic supporters and the wider Catholic community in Scotland. In August 2009, a man from Birmingham, England, received a suspended sentence after making derogatory comments to a police officer, who was of Irish origin. The prosecutor said the man had made racist remarks about the officer, including accusations that the officer was a "plastic Paddy".

Alex Massie wrote in National Review:

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.

Australian songwriter Eric Bogle wrote and recorded a song titled "Plastic Paddy". In Spiked, Brendan O'Neill uses the term to describe "second-generation wannabe" Irishmen, and writes that some of those guilty of "plastic Paddyism" (or, in his words, "Dermot-itis") are Bill Clinton, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Shane MacGowan. British mixed martial arts fighter Dan Hardy has called American fighter Marcus Davis a "plastic Paddy" due to Marcus' enthusiasm for his Irish ancestry. In the book Why I Am Still a Catholic: Essays in Faith and Perseverance by Peter Stanford, the television presenter Dermot O'Leary describes his upbringing as "classic plastic Paddy", where he would be "bullied in a nice way" by his own cousins in Wexford for being English "until anyone else there called me English and then they would stick up for me."

See also

• Mockney
• More Irish than the Irish themselves
• Wannabe
• Cultural cringe

References

• Arrowsmith, Aidan (2004). "Plastic Paddies vs. Master Racers: "Soccer" and Irish Identity". The International Journal of Cultural Studies (Staffordshire Univ, England) 7 (4): 460–79. doi:10.1177/1367877904047864. ISSN 1367-8779. 
• ""To Fly By Those Nets": Violence and Identity in Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark". Irish University Review 34 (2 Autumn/Winter 2004): 315–31. 2004. ISSN 0021-1427. 
• "Fantasy Ireland: The Figure of the Returnee in Irish Culture". Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing (Special Edition: Postcolonial Ireland) 3 (1): 101–14. 2003. ISSN 1474-4600. 
• Bery, A.; P. Murray (2000). 'Inside/Out: Literature, Cultural Identity and Irish Migration to England' in Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations. London: Macmillan. pp. 59–69. ISBN 0-333-72339-2. 
• Brewster, S; V. Crossman, F. Becket & D. Alderson (eds) (1999). 'M/Otherlands: Literature, Gender, Diasporic Identity' in Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space. London: Routledge. pp. 129–44. ISBN 0-415-18958-6. 
• Chambers, Lilian; Jordan, Eamonn (2006). 'Genuinely Inauthentic: Martin McDonagh’s Second Generation Irishness’, in The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories. Dublin: Carysfort Press. pp. 236–45. ISBN 1-904505-19-8. http://www.eri.mmu.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?id=52. 
• Graham, Colin; Malley, Willy (August, 1999). "Debating Diasporic Identity: Nostalgia, (Post) Nationalism, "Critical Traditionalism"". Irish Studies Review (Special Edition: 'Irish Studies and Postcolonial Theory') 7 (2): 173–82. 

External links

• UK suffers from Plastic Paddy syndrome
• Man Who's 1/16 Irish Proud Of His Irish Heritage (satirical article from The Onion)