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I am Irish, we are not an ethnostate whatsoever. Truthfully I don’t know why we have citizenship by descent but Irish people roll their eyes at Americans with Irish ancestry.

It’s not about ethnicity though, it’s familial lineage. If your grandfather was Bangladeshi and moved to Ireland and was a citizen, then his descendants moved to the US, they would be entitled to Irish citizenship.

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Ireland is a homeland for Irish people. That was the whole point of the country. The same is true for my country. It was something achieved at great cost for the sake of a people.

How many Bangladeshis had Irish citizenship in 1950? Almost none. Ireland was 87% Irish as recently as 2006, probably more if you exclude residents with UK citizenship. Virtually anyone who doesn’t have Irish citizenship but whose grandparents did have Irish citizenship is ethnically Irish. For most European countries, there is no difference between “ethnicity” and “familial lineage” until recently.

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