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, utilises 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
Read more about this topic: Plastic Paddy
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