The Kilt's use in Irish Nationalism

[Blackrose87]

Mark Twain once observed that naked people have little or no impact on history, and the same applies to kilted Irishmen. All 87 of them, and that includes Pearce and the boys at St. Enda's!

I can very much understand Highland Scots wearing the kilt as it is an organic-- no, a genuine part of their cultural heritage. By extension I can even appreciate the rest of Scotland embracing the kilt as representative of a very romantic period in their national history.

I can also understand how, in a country like America where people sometimes try desperately to exert their individuality, ethnic groups that lack a unique form of national dress can feel disadvantaged when it comes time to play at "dress up", and others don kimonos, dashikis, a fez, or even a kilt, and they are left wearing "ordinary" clothes.

But it seems very false, to me at least, when people with no historical or cultural link to the native costume of other peoples adopt that garb and attempt to justify it as their own. It's rather as if they are ashamed of who they are, culturally, simply because they lack a suitable mode of dress to express their ethnicity, and so they latch on to something that is, at the very wildest stretch of the imagination, not even remotely related to themselves, merely for the sake of social self-aggrandizement.

Which is a pity. Because in trying so hard to be something they are not, they loose sight of who they really are. Perhaps it is because the vast majority of the Irish know who they are that they don't feel the need to dress up like Scotsmen?

You seem to completely exclude Ulster-Scots from your reasoning. While maintaining a close link to thier Scottish heritage, they definitely identify themselves as Ulstermen, and Northern Irish.

To be honest, outside Ulster-Scots nobody wears a kilt in Ireland.

I do not identify myself as such, even though my fathers family would. But I like wearing my kilt, and do not really have to explain why I should be allowed to wear it. However, having spent a quarter of my life in Scotland, I feel I have more a right than an 5th generation American who's had a holiday to Edinburgh.