Photograph: Getty ImagesThere was an interesting problem on the Daily Telegraph’s agony aunt page the other day, in which a concerned mother in London worried that her teenage son was turning “Irish”. The mother herself was half Irish, on her father’s side, so the teenager was in a high-risk group for developing symptoms. I might also add in passing that “Polly Amory” would be an excellent name for an agony aunt. The Normans started it, becoming famously “more Irish than the Irish themselves” and launching the Eight Hundred Years of Impressionism. It can only have been to acknowledge overseas competition from the offspring of our emigrating monks and scholars that, for clarity, he had to be known as “Irish Irish John”, or “John, the Irishman from Ireland”.

Source: The Irish Times November 06, 2025 14:19 UTC