I suspect the one thing that unites Northern nationalists and Ulster unionists these days is warmness towards Irish-America. On the surface, this might seem a bit incongruous. Aren’t all Irish-Americans card-carrying members of Noraid?

Not a bit of it.

Unionists also have plenty “skin in the game,” as the Yanks like to say. Ian Paisley (are we still obliged to suffix any mention of him with ‘Junior?’) was gushing in his praise of Donald Trump the other day after an invitation to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day, posing like a proper fanboy with the inscrutable Melania.

Writing for the Belfast Telegraph, he claimed the ‘tide has turned,’ with unionism investing time and energy in a ‘concerted campaign to deliver a message to a captive audience about Northern Ireland and its needs at the present time.’

Good for him. No, sincerely. It’s entirely right that unionists head out to Washington and New York for the St. Patrick’s Day festivities. After all, given that around twenty US Presidents were of Ulster-Scots heritage, this is their story too.

The warmness of the Northern Irish tribes towards their kith and kin in the US of A is not matched in the south.

In fact, I’m not sure it ever has been.

There’s often a sour, condescending tone towards Irish-America, summed up for me in that dreadful 1990 film version of The Field. The gist is that an uppity Yank, returning to the ancestral lands, rubs the locals’ noses in their provincial insularity before the hoary old farmer, played by Richard Harris, kills him with a rock.

It stands as a metaphor for how the sneering Dublin cognoscenti views blue-collar Irish-Americans:  privileged and, well, vulgar interlopers. It was on full display in the Irish Times the other day, courtesy of Una Mullally’s piece, titled: ‘Irish America does not represent modern-day Ireland.’ (A classic example of journalese: responding to a point that was never made in the first place).

‘At home, Irish people see Irish-Americans as wide-eyed and plastic,’ she intoned, (speaking, she would have it, for the entire Irish nation). For Mullally, the whole of Irish-America is ‘looking back across the Atlantic’ at a society that has moved on, ‘still clinging to the fiction of the past being present.’

She makes a reasonable point about the treatment of gay rights campaigners, who were excluded for far too long from St. Patrick’s Day events. Fair enough. But she offers a small hook upon which to hang an enormous charge. The same ‘conservatism’ she assigns to Irish-America, especially a generation ago, was equally true of Britain (and much of the rest of the Western world) at the time as well.

But it’s the ‘plastic’ paddy remark that is most curious. I’ve never really understood the point of the insult. Would Mullally prefer that Irish exiles – who have invariably left because of the failure of successive governments to provide enough jobs and opportunities for their own people – simply abandoned their heritage?

The GI’s – the Global Irish – have needed to club together to celebrate their heritage and religion because of the genuine discrimination and hostility they faced. This is why St. Patrick’s Day remains a bigger (and far better) gig outside the island of Ireland than on it.

Like most Dublin swells, Ms Mullally presumably approves of Irish-Americans coming over in their droves to avail themselves of Ireland’s (still underwhelming) tourism offer – as long as they don’t flap their gums and show how backward they are.

Yet a cursory glance at the website of the Irish Development Agency finds an entire page dedicated to the ‘diaspora.’ For 60 years, the IDA has cultivated a ‘warm, constructive and productive relationship’ with Irish emigrants the world over.

As a result, US investment into Ireland actually doubled between 2010 and 2015, to €329bn, with €40 billion of goods and services exported to the US. This is almost twice the amount of US investment that goes to France and Germany – combined.

You may not like them, Una, but where would you be without all those plastic paddies?