Twenty odd years ago, a former colleague of mine was about to get married. She was from Northern Ireland and, while in London, she had met an Englishman called Anthony. She described, with amusement, the polite questions from her relatives. Without asking directly, they were trying to find out whether he was a catholic. Anthony, she told me, was a name far more common among catholics than protestants in Northern Ireland. Another friend, this one a catholic called Rory, told me of an occasion when he had been out with a mixed group of friends in Belfast at an event where he knew most of the audience would be protestants. He asked his friends to call him Roy, not Rory, as his name would immediately tell others where he was from. It worked for most of the evening until one of them forgot and shouted ‘Rory’ across the room. Fortunately…
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