The luck o’ the Irish - We should all recognise what we have

AS WE begin the first of two consecutive long weekends — the first to celebrate our national day, the second to mark one of Christianity’s central beliefs — it’s as good a time as any to acknowledge and celebrate some of the good things about living in Ireland and being Irish.

Generations of writers drank themselves — and too many others — to death trying to put Irishness in a sentence. Summer-school squadrons of academics have volunteered all sorts of interpretations and split hairs — occasionally heads — over which vision represents the one, true Gaeldom.

Every sort of zealot — republican, religious, political, sporting or cultural — has insisted that disagreeing with them represents a betrayal of heritage and nation.