By Paul Daley
Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are perhaps the most prominent of the 6 million or so Australians who, every year about this time, like to claim their Irish heritage.
No problem there. I am with them.
"Mum, what's St Patrick's Day?" my little girl asked last Thursday morning.
"It's an excuse for people to say they are Irish and then drink a whole lot of black beer," her Scottish Presbyterian mother explained rather wearily, tossing a dagger-y glance across the breakfast table.
Clearly she has failed to repress the memory of all those St Patrick's Days of our earlier lives together. I have no such problem. In fact I'd like to remember.
But anyway, Rudd and Abbott now do this double-act thing on St Pat's Day whereby they bang on about their claimed Irish ancestry because it gives them a semi-legitimate excuse to bang on about what they really like banging on about the most - themselves.
It all seems pretty good-natured and fun, and for an hour or two you can be forgiven for thinking that these two guys actually like each other, as they blarney on about whose saint is the best (St Kevin was apparently something of a toxic bore and St Anthony, meanwhile, was the patron of lost causes, which is perhaps why my dear mum chose him to pray to that I might become a priest) and whose mates are out to stitch them up and whose career prospects are the worst.
And then you have to pinch yourself, because you realise that despite all the craic and the self-effacing bonhomie, these guys are not really on some Stormont-style Green Unity ticket here, but they are just doing what they do best - raw stump politics - and that they really want to be out on the bog-side tossing Molly cocktails at each other.
As Kevin himself has said: "Politics and the Irish go together like leprechauns and rainbows."
I can attest to that. I met a man on a train en route from Dublin to Galway. As the train slowed slightly to ease through a cutting, he told me that we were entering a part of the countryside that was home to many fairies.
Perhaps I raised an eyebrow. "Only an eejit would not believe in fairies," he snapped, before extolling the virtues of our former (Irish-Australian) prime minister, Paul Keating.
"There'd be a job for Keating here, all right, to sort out our pack o' gob-shites."
Indeed. There could be no doubt about Keating's Irishness.
And I have, meanwhile, met both the Rudd and the Abbott doppelgangers during my extensive travels across the old country.
"Paul, let me tell yer dat while you've been searchin' all over Oireland for your people dey are roight here near Belfast. For de Daleys are a famous family of Chihuahua breeders and toilet manufacturers, republican boys all, just up on da coast in Antrim. So you see if you want to know any-ting about yourself or for dat matter any-ting about any-ting at all in de world, you just come right here and I …"
Yes, his name was Kevin. I met him in a bar in Belfast. He was there to help.
When I got back to my then home in London a few days later, the phone was ringing.
"Now Paul, I just wanted to make sure ye got home safely and I forgot to warn ye not to eat de little breakfast sausages on Royanair, because dey gave me de runs some-ting severe and now dat you're home I just wanted to say …" Kevin!
Tony I met in a safe house off the Shankill Road. He was involved in a breakaway loyalist group. He had blue prison tattoos across his knuckles that spelt MALS TORM.
"Dis," he said, shoving clenched fists into my face, "is what Oi'd be all about den".
"That says 'Mal Storm'. Isn't maelstrom usually spelt with an e after the a and with the r before the o?" I inquired.
He stared for a long time in a mad dog way and I thought I might die. Then he said, "Shite, Paul, would happen."
"And what's it with you being so hung up on da details?"
Tony - definitely not a details guy.
Then he broke out the Guinness and said one day he'd come to Oz because a lot of mates, mostly IRA snitches, were down there on witness protection.
Woofing bonkers. But likeable, Tony.
Until next St Pat's Day.