Professor Bríona Nic Dhiarmada

It's hilarious, you know.

It's very, very interesting.

I think we do.

I think we've always conceived of ourselves in too narrow a framework, you know.

We think we're on this little island, we stayed on this little island

you know, we were this kind of homogenous nation.

That's not the case.

You know, we went everywhere and we've left legacies everywhere.

And, you know, those legacies sometimes are not exactly what we think if we think of what does it mean to be Irish.

In fact, in the US, 40% of African-Americans have some sort of Irish ancestry.

And, of course, this was all, in a sense, this was really a hidden history because, of course, if the Irish intermarried with African-Americans, whether they were

descendants of slaves or not their Irish aspect was hidden if you like because obviously genetically speaking the African gene took precedence in terms of colour so it really isn't until now with genetic testing and all of that that people are beginning to see what their antecedents are and discovering as I say that 40% of African Americans have an Irish connection and there's a man called Dennis Brownlee who's involved in an organisation called the

Irish, African-American diaspora organisations trying to, you know, trying to, I suppose, shine a light on that and show that we are actually quite diverse in our legacy worldwide.