page_title: Plastic Paddy
section_title: United Kingdom
hierarchical_section_title: Plastic Paddy / Usage / United Kingdom
caption_attribution_description: English: Presenter
context_page_description: Plastic Paddy is a slang expression describing unconvincing or obviously non-native Irishness. The phrase has been used as a positive reinforcement and as a derogatory term in various situations, including within Ireland itself. The term has sometimes been applied to people who may misappropriate or misrepresent stereotypical aspects of Irish customs. In this sense, the plastic Paddy may know little of actual Irish culture, but nevertheless assert an Irish identity. In other contexts, the term has been applied to members of the Irish diaspora who have distanced themselves from perceived stereotypes and, in the 1980s, the phrase was used to describe Irish people who had emigrated to England and were seeking assimilation into English culture.
context_section_description: Mary J. Hickman writes that "plastic Paddy" was a term used to "deny and denigrate the second-generation Irish in Britain" in the 1980s, and was "frequently articulated by the new middle-class Irish immigrants in Britain, for whom it was a means of distancing themselves from established Irish communities." According to Bronwen Walter, Professor of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, "the adoption of a hyphenated identity has been much more problematic for the second generation Irish in Britain. The Irish-born have frequently denied the authenticity of their Irish identity, using the derogatory term plastic Paddy, and the English regard them as "assimilated" and simply "English".
  The term has been used to taunt non-Irish born players who choose to play for the Republic of Ireland national football team, fans of Irish teams, who are members of supporters clubs outside Ireland, and other Irish individuals living in Great Britain. A study by the University of Strathclyde and Nil by Mouth found the term was used abusively on Celtic and Rangers supporters' Internet forums in reference to Celtic supporters and the wider Catholic community in Scotland. In August 2009, a man from Birmingham, England, received a suspended sentence after making derogatory comments to a police officer, who was of Irish origin. The prosecutor said the man had made racist remarks about the officer, including accusations that the officer was a "plastic Paddy".
  In the book Why I Am Still a Catholic: Essays in Faith and Perseverance by Peter Stanford, the television presenter Dermot O'Leary describes his upbringing as "classic plastic Paddy", where he would be "bullied in a nice way" by his own cousins in Wexford for being English "until anyone else there called me English and then they would stick up for me."
  In Spiked, Brendan O'Neill uses the term to refer to "second-generation wannabe" Irishmen, and writes that some of those guilty of "plastic Paddyism" (or, in his words, "Dermot-itis") are Bill Clinton, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Shane MacGowan.
caption: English broadcaster Dermot O'Leary described his upbringing as "classic plastic Paddy"
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