I’VE been musing lately about how jokes which reference the Irish as lacking in the thinking department tend to start with the words “An Irishman, A Scotsman and an Englishman...” whereas when I was growing up in County Antrim, the gag always began “Paddy The Irishman, Paddy The Scotsman, and Paddy The Englishman....”.

The difference being that the true Paddy always came off as the story’s hero, however inept he might have appeared. I never quite got over my sense of unease that the Scotsman and Englishman were also called Paddy, although I suspected it had something in common with the fact that a local farmer, who had spent a relatively minor fraction of his adult life chasing the American Dream, was forever known only by the epithet “The Yank”.