Rhapsodizing in a Dundalk pub over a distant relative who had played for Ireland against New Zealand, President Joe Biden declared: “He was a hell of a rugby player. He beat the hell out of the All Blacks.”

That, at least, was how the White House reported his remarks. What the president actually said was, “He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.” The Black and Tans were not a rugby team but an auxiliary police force, largely made up of demobilized soldiers, many of them brutalized by their experience in the trenches. The Black and Tans fought an ugly war against Irish republican militiamen after 1920.

BIDEN BUTCHERS IRISH HISTORY BY REFERRING TO RUGBY TEAM AS 'BLACK AND TANS'

Biden’s Irish hosts went along with the gaffe. They know how to lean into the American version of Irishness, with its shamrocks and Saint Patrick’s Day parades. Biden’s presence in a pub was part of the whole Erin’s Isle fantasy, as was his slightly awkward joke about being a sober Irishman.

It was hard not to think of the classic Simpsons episode in which Homer comes to Ireland expecting to find leprechauns and ends up being told by a judge as he is deported: “It’s got a lot nicer since we sent all our incompetent half-wits to America — where you, for some reason, made them police officers.”

Part of American Irishness is an exaggerated grievance against Britain. When Biden was first elected, a BBC journalist asked him for a comment. “I’m Irish,” replied the president-elect, as though this were reason enough not to talk to the British broadcaster. I honestly can’t think of anyone in Ireland who would say that, seriously or in jest. The BBC is widely watched on both sides of the border, and Irish politicians, including those from Sinn Fein, appear on it regularly.

Ethnically, Biden is less Irish (and more English) than I am. But like most of the 6 million or so Brits of Irish origin, it has never occurred to me that I carry an ancestral feud against England.

What makes Irish America different? The obvious answer is that many Irish people settled in the United States after 1845, refugees from the Famine. That catastrophe also drove many to emigrate to England and Scotland, but those who were most hostile to the Crown were prepared to make the longer journey — partly, according to historians, because they were more likely to owe back taxes.

Irish Americans were readier than Irish people to see the potato blight as a genocide — a theory popularized by the pro-slavery Confederate agitator John Mitchel. And, of course, the U.S. has its own story of secession. Never mind that, in 1776, most Irish Catholics were for the Crown, while most Ulster Protestants were for independence. Never mind that the American cousins of those Ulster Protestants were the most hard-line patriots. (George Washington said, "If defeated everywhere else, I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scotch-Irish of my native Virginia.") So powerful these days is the appeal of victimhood that even many Americans of Ulster (so-called Scotch-Irish) descent have come to think of themselves as Irish.

Victimhood means defining Ireland as a former British colony. But it is striking that almost no theorists of colonialism at the time, including Vladimir Lenin, put it in that category. During the heyday of the British Empire, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, with representation at Westminster.

“Throughout the Empire,” writes the historian Kevin Kenny, “Irish Catholics served as soldiers and administrators, or worked as policemen, doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, or businessmen.” In 1830, when Ireland accounted for around 30% of the U.K.’s population, it supplied (according to a study by Peter Karsten) 42% of the soldiers in the British Army.

In the Indian Civil Service, the proportion was closer to 50%. Reginald Dyer, the officer responsible for machine-gunning unarmed protesters in Amritsar in 1919, is remembered as an unfeeling English toff. But he was born in Punjab to an Irish father and educated in County Cork. The lieutenant governor who backed him, Michael O’Dwyer, was a Catholic from County Tipperary.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

History is dappled, as most people living on either side of the Irish border know. Unlike their cousins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, they do not have the luxury of reducing the story to a simple morality tale with good guys and bad guys. In the simplified version, Irish unity is intrinsically progressive, rather than simply an alteration of borders similar to, say, a Mexican absorption of New Mexico.

Politics, like history, is messy. Grasping that is the first step toward understanding Northern Ireland.