It’s the 17th of March, which means there’s going to be a lot of tedious people rediscovering their “Irish roots” as if wearing green and drinking Guinness makes you proper fucking Tuatha de Danaan or something. I’m precisely one-eighth Irish, and that probably still makes me more Irish than most of these pricks. Great-granda John Laughlin was a Belfast Catholic, by the way, born in 1883 just as it was about to become even worse than usual to be a Catholic in Belfast… don’t know when exactly but he found himself in Scotland by the early 1900s, where he had six kids, four of whom grew up Catholic and two of whom grew up Protestant, which is how I came to be nominally Protestant myself in spite of old Johnny boy, who I think had actually abandoned the family by that point, whereupon (according to a letter from him in 1951 my Gran kept and I now have somewhere) he had another family entirely in England. I feel sometimes like I was doomed to have turned out kind of complicated because of him…
