Plastic Paddy

This is often seen in non-Irish citizens who have a romantic or noble savage image of "the Irish Race" and those who enact stereotypes to appeal to tourists.

[17] The Killarney Active Retirement Association displayed a banner promising to "Chase the plastic Paddy out of Ireland" in the Kerry 2005 St Patrick's Day celebrations,[18] and Irish journalists have used the term to characterise Irish bars in the diaspora as inauthentic and with the "minimum of plastic paddy trimmings".

[20] First generation Irish-English model Erin O'Connor was called a "plastic Paddy" in Ireland due to her parents' choice of forename and non-Irish birth despite their both being Irish citizens.

[26] In August 2009, an English man from Birmingham received a suspended sentence after making derogatory comments to a police officer who was of Irish origin.

[27] In Peter Stanford's book Why I Am Still a Catholic: Essays in Faith and Perseverance, the broadcaster Dermot O'Leary (who was born and raised in England to Irish parents)[28] describes his upbringing as "classic plastic Paddy", mentioning that his cousins in Ireland would tease him for "being English" but would defend him if other Irish people tried to do the same.

[30] Brendan O'Neill uses the term in Spiked to refer to "second-generation wannabe" Irishmen,[31] and writes that some of those guilty of "plastic Paddyism" (or, in his words, "Dermot-itis") include Bill Clinton, Daniel Day-Lewis and Shane MacGowan.

[34] Alex Massie, a Scottish journalist, wrote in National Review: When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in.