Why oh why are the snowflake Irish always so upset by the British claiming their stuff?

Why oh why are the snowflake Irish always so upset by British people claiming their stuff? Why? Why!?

In the wake of the Emmy nominations yesterday, both far left and far right British organisations (the Guardian and the Daily Mail) have declared the actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott to be British in a series of tweets and articles.

Predictably, the easily roused Irish Twitterati were appalled. “You are claiming our people!” they cried, spitting the clay pipes from their lumpen gobs and dropping the pigs from their arms to begin typing on their BlackBerrys. Snowflakes.

Call me a contrarian if you like, but I feel it should be okay for two close countries – best pals, if you will – to share things. For years our lumpy wet land masses had a sweet deal going on. The British ruling class got a bunch of land, a peasant servant race and a place to work out their boarding-school abandonment issues while the Irish got regressive agrarianism, ITV3 (but not ITV1) and a language with far too many nouns.

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It was a quid pro quo, just something buds did in the olden days. And if sometimes the relationship seemed a little "off", as though the British were getting more from the relationship than they were putting in, just remember what Churchill used to say: "Colonial chums! Let's not squabble over who violently subjugated whom! Let's leave the past in the past (and all the priceless artefacts in the British Museum, hyuk, hyuk, hyuk)!"

We should also take a closer look at the actors in question. Andrew Scott is definitely British. Look at his second name. Look at his phrenologically aristocratic forehead. He also starred as the Sherlock villain with the very British name Moriarty, and his Emmy nomination was for his role in the disturbing sci-fi drama Black Mirror. This is another tell. In Ireland we call mirrors "enchanted face windows", and we fear them too much to ever appear in a show so named.

Then there's Paul Mescal. He won his nomination after starring in the television programme Normal People, which is about, as the title suggests, "normal people", referring unambiguously and clearly to British people, not superstitious bog folk who sustain themselves on Tanora, unfinished business parks and spite. (Sorry if this is a bit too close to the bone for those of you in the midlands.) He also plays the English game of sky hockey, goes to the British university of Trinity College (that one's fair enough, says you) and takes his clothes off a lot, enabling us to see his "lad" or, as readers in Britain refer to it, "Queen Victoria's special little gentleman".

The nudity is a dead giveaway. Irish people, as you know, are never nude. Our infamously censorious response to seeing bare arses on television is a product not just of sexual prudishness but also of simple unfamiliarity. "What is this unholy flesh valley?" as one complainant screamed on Liveline.

"I believe it's an arse," said Joe Duffy. "A British arse with a British passport clearly visible and clutched between its cheeks."

In fairness, I have noticed some inconsistencies in British approaches to Irish stuff that do give me pause. British newspapers never claim Brian "Bryan" McFadden as their own. And we keep sending them members of Boyzone and they keep returning them. Jim Corr, for the record, has never been to Ireland in his life. There have also been worrying moves recently to recategorise Prince Andrew as Irish. Daily Mail editors have begun adding the words "lilting brogue" to old articles about him. But I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about that now. Plans for a statue on O'Connell Street have already commenced.