St Patrick’s Day: Famous people you may be surprised to learn are Irish

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St Patrick’s Day is almost upon us and with it comes the inevitable, tenuous claims from friends of having Irish heritage.

But a number of high-profile actors actually do have genuine claims about their Irish ancestry.

George Clooney recently talked about his Irish descendants during a conversation with refugees and explained how his family had arrived in the US. A number of other famous names have also emerged as having some sort of Irish heritage, including Meryl Streep, Dominic West and Emily Ratajkowski.

Click through the gallery for more famous faces who are also Irish.

Claims of Irish heritage are particularly high in the US, where 35.5million Americans – 11.6 per cent of the population – claim to have at least partial Irish ancestry. That’s five times as many Irish people in the USA claiming to be Irish than there is in Ireland.

This article appeared in its original form here.