I see the fash are discussing the "Irish ethnicity" thing again.

Irish ethnicity is a fantasy, its a piece of wank fic to imagine into life a sort of eternal "nation" which must be protected against outsiders.

The Irish genetic mixture is just another bunch of Europeans, with different elements happening at slightly different times. We're not particularly unique.

The baseline genetic clades are: a largish group descended from a people somewhere around the Basque region, after the ice age, who ended up in Scotland, and crossed into Ulster via a landbridge around Larne. (Basically the fair skin, dark hair template)

Later, a smaller group of people descended from a group in the Ukraine, started arriving via a long migration loop from Scandinavia. This is where the rather rare red hair comes from.

Somewhere in the mix are a group of dark skinned, blue eyed hunter gatherers who had a presence in what's now England. Their RNA is still extant in the pasty-white people DNA mixture.

Sometime later, a wage of agriculturalists from, basically, Turkey, the Levant and maybe northern Africa showed up, bringing farming and a bunch of material culture.

Later still, waves of "Indo-European" speaking peoples, maybe from the Ukraine, but moving westwards across Germany-France, showed up.

That's the basic mix. It's also in no way homogenous: you get lots of the Ukrainian-Norse-whatever RNA showing up in some northern coastal communities, and a lot more Iberian elsewhere. Whole lot of smaller back-and-forth from the near Continent too.

Around 500 BC, some horse riding guys with apparently slightly better iron show up and kill off/marry sufficient of the local elite to make a cultural difference. We call these guys the Celts, but their actual genetic trace is marginal. (We're not really Celts, you see)

Celts being a weird, unstable term, a descriptor given by the Greeks and Romans for any number of hairy angry people from North of the Alps. (Later, the Romans divided the hairy angry people into two: west of the Rhine: Celt, East: German)

Our connection with this world was largely cultural: we sold a lot of gold and slaves to the "Celtic" heartland of Austria-ish places. We had a deeper connection with Celticised Iberia (easier to get to by sea). Iberians kept showing up over the ages.

There's also a complicated set of migrations to and from Welsh-speaking western Britain and Ireland (The aul Brigantes got around a lot, for example)

That all stewed away until the 8th century of the Christian era, when the Norse showed up, built cities, married the locals, murdered some of the elites, hung out, enslaved and pillaged each other.

Later a bunch of French-speaking Norse thugs show up from Wales and France to claim Ireland in the name of the English king. (Yes, my king, we're totally building these huge realms here for, er, you. Absolutely. Not for us at all. Totally)

From around the 6th century onwards, we have a small, but noticeable trickle of Egyptians. Coptic craftsmen would come from Egypt to decorate Christian churches. A bunch stayed. This went on into the early modern era.

Once you are into the early modern, you get, well, everyone. People from the Baltics. French exiles. Spanish exiles. English everything. Every shade of Scot. All flavours of Jewish community. Germans. Traders from all over.

And that's before the modern moment where Dublin is full of everyone else.

We are not a genetic master race. We're not some precious bloodline. We're not some pure line of anything. We're just some people living on a wet island in the arse end of nowhere.

And lots of us *not* living on a wet island in the arse end of nowhere.

There's a lot of us, we're nothing special, and a few extra of us with interesting skin tones is not going to change much of anything.

Settle the fuck down.

/Fin