Vagina Indentata, the patron saint of middle-aged, pinko, commie, Irish women who don't scare easy

By the time you read this I should be revived from my foetal position over the toilet bowl where I will have spent most of Friday recovering from Thursday – commonly known in these parts as St Patrick's Day. I will not have got myself into that state because of unrestrained celebrations to commemorate the national saint and his conversion of the Gaelic hordes to Christianity, because I will have hopefully escaped the bonanza of patriotic, over the top, sure-aren't-we-great revelry. Instead I will have holed up with another Northern pal to explore our particular brand of Irish identity. The kind that comes with a skull and crossbones and warns that the attached individual should not be imbibed directly or left close to an exposed flame.

My pal and I will of course be imbibing directly the juice of the grape and will copiously refresh ourselves with one another's perspectives, our mutually-adored good sense and Northern black humour. We will, to all intents and purposes, be engaging in a Nordie love-in. Those who are experienced observers of the North will not be perplexed by the revelation that my pal is a Prod and I, a Fenian. We revel in our contradictions, find unmitigated joy in our common criticisms of Free Staters and Brits and, by the end of a night on the drink, have usually decided we are not just the only true Gaels left, but are the direct bloodline to the Lost Tribe of Israel, the Amazons and may even be descended from Arthur C Clarke's extraterrestrial supra-intelligent life forms.

You see, my pal, who is a thespian, and I make a great team: the thespian and the lesbian. We have often ruminated about the stereotypes of Northerners that have gained currency "down here". How we are difficult, aggressive, opinionated (moi?), hard to understand – and that's just our accents. Conversely, our accents are also found to be "sexy", especially after a packet of cigs and we are in the company of people who think Dublin 4 accents are the equivalent of BBC English. Then there is the little matter of how we approach life, we stab at it like it is something to be nailed down before it runs away from us and does not return. Life is to be grappled with and wrestled to the ground and made ours because it is too bloody short and we know that from harsh experience.

All of which makes us just a little, well you know, sort of foreign, even though we come from 90 miles up the road. So all the talk of a multicultural Ireland and an Ireland of the welcomes leaves me and the thespian pal just a wee bit perplexed. In our drink-addled brains we become the most alien of all the peoples here because we look like you, can even sound like you, especially if you are from Donegal, yet we do not fit in. And god forbid we should ever let it be known that we might harbour Republican aspirations of a united Ireland. The Prod pal is especially partial to the united Ireland scenario, (I know it's confusing but stick with it, you might learn something) because then the wrath of every revisionist ol' arsehole who ever wrote for a Tony O'Reilly publication, gets visited upon the people of the entire statelet of Northern Ireland (the pal still calls it a province – old habits die hard).

At some point in the evening I will start on my favourite, drunken bugbear: that Neil Jordan's film, Michael Collins never once, let me repeat that, NOT ONCE, not even in the scenes of the secret cabinet meetings of the first Dáil, made mention, never mind portrayed Constance Markievicz. And these people call themselves Irish. Ha!

Then the bosom pal, buddy, comrade, sister, who will never find a man that is good enough for her according to me, will commence with the stories of backstage shenanigans where it is taken for granted that because she is appearing in an O'Casey play and living in Dublin, that of course, she must be a left-footer. I tell her I don't get how they could ever think that: her eyes are too close together for a Catholic, at which point we practically piss ourselves laughing.

I'm not sure what St Patrick would make of the two of us. "Spinning" and "grave" are the words that come quickest to mind. There are plenty more like us, and we do not all come from the North – you can't blame all that diversity on us – but Ireland and the Irish have and never will be a homogenous concept, no matter how much Irish-Americans might wish it. By about midnight, the mucker* and I will probably have drunk a toast to our favourite saint, Vagina Indentata, the patron saint of middle-aged, pinko, commie, Irish women who don't scare easy. Now why can't she be the patron saint of Ireland?

* mucker: Northern slang for best pal, especially when one is three sheets to the wind