A corollary to the Irish weakness...

...for alcohol is their tendency to blame the British for all their troubles.

Following on my previous post on Jaywalking with the Irish:

One eye-opening statistic would be a tally of the number of stupid and abusive rants that occur in pubs after heavy swilling -- the scary second Janus face of the Irish drinker. Experts at this sport develop invisible, hydraulically activated gauges in their heads that keep them upright when those of other nationalities would topple over hours earlier. 

A couple of decades ago, these gauges came imprinted with the get-even word "British." Whisper the B-word in the evening's declining hours and you would immediately witness gears turning in slack faces and vacant eyes burning with fresh life -- chugga-chugga bang went the internal hydraulics and out came a tirade about the last eight hundred years...

Now, as an Irish-American I don't recall too much complaining about the British. (My ancestors arrived on these shores well over a hundred years ago.) Besides, we had our own demons (the Catholic Church, our fathers, etc.) to blame for our shortcomings. But when I hear about the terrible things the British did to the Irish for eight hundred years, not only do I think Shame on the Brits! but also Shame on the Irish! You let them do all that to you for almost a millennium? Shame on you!