Not sure if this is the right subreddit for this. If not please link to the correct subreddit. A little background on this question: My mother's family has always prouded itself on its Irish heritage to an extreme amount. They are heavily involved in the Catholic church, their diet, superstitions all fit the stereotypical 4th/5th generation Irish immigrant family. Yet my mom and I did genealogy DNA testing earlier this year and found we barely had any Irish DNA (4% for my mother) and in fact were primarily English (73% for my mother). Why would an English family try so hard to be Irish in an era that detested Irish?
Thank you
EDIT: Thanks for the replies I've learned alot and your comments have helped look at this in a whole other light.
I'd be cautious about taking the DNA results at face value, though. Ireland and England's histories have been entwined for a very long time and there has been a lot of crossover. Lord Wellington, for instance, was born in Ireland to a member of the "Anglo-Irish" class which held most of the political power throughout the 19th century - others include WB Yeats, Arthur Guinness and Oscar Wilde. Elizabeth Bowen, another member of the Anglo-Irish class, described herself as feeling English while in Ireland, but Irish while in England. Others such as Wolfe Tone and Jonathan Swift became vocal supporters of Irish independence, and heartily identified as Irish despite their English heritage going back in some cases to the Norman Conquest.
That's just one example of the ways in which someone could be genetically English, but culturally fully Irish.
DNA is not ethnicity. There isn't such a thing as "Irish DNA" (or "English DNA", or any "country's DNA" for that matter). There is an extreme variability of genetic material in all of the countries in the world, especially those which had such close ties with each other as England and Ireland.
It's not like there is some template of Irish genes and all Irish people have a specific set of them. There are geographic gradients of genes' distributions, where some types of alleles are more prevalent in a specific place than in others but there is no way of telling where a person is from just by looking at their gene makeup.
I don't know what the company that made your genetic screening had in mind when they told you that your mother had 4% Irish DNA and 73% English DNA. They most probably didn't do a full genome sequencing, which is too expensive for it to become a common tool in genealogy. They probably just tested a few places in the non-coding part of your genome that exhibit a high degree of heterogeneity among different people. They might have found that 4% of those fragments looked like the fragments found most commonly in Irish people and 73% of those fragments corresponded to fragments found most commonly in the English population. That doesn't mean that your ancestors were English, though.
where did you do this DNA testing?
OP - Also, did you check how much of your family's ancestors actually claimed to be Irish? In other words, was it a case of an Irish immigrant marries someone, raises a kid in an "Irish" neighborhood, that kid identifies as Irish, marries someone, rinse, repeat?
Genetics do not explain culture, and are poor indicators of geography. Follow the paper trail to find answers (and questions).