Are the Irish white people

The short answer is yes. The Irish are generally light skinned (90%), light or mixed eye colour, and more often dark haired (43%) than medium haired (35%) with a light-haired and red-haired minority.

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The above answer is incredibly moronic, and seems to define 'race' as visual characteristics and nothing more. By 2k3r021's logic a black albino is 'Caucasian' because he/she LOOKS it.

The Irish, along with the Scots and the Welsh, are descended from the Celts. The Celts did descend from Caucasians, but a long, long time ago, so it depends what you consider to be enough generations to consider someone a different 'race' as their ancestors (bear in mind that both white and black people, as well as all humans, descended from the same group of humans at some point).

Another point that should be considered is that while many people TODAY consider Irish people to be 'white' Caucasians, the white racists of 300 years ago would have strongly disagreed - in fact, the common opinion in America 300 years ago was that Irish people were quite simply a different (and lower) race from 'white people'. The signs outside businesses in those days read "No blacks or Irish". They were considered dirty, their bloodline spoiled.

The idea that 'race' is determined by visual characteristics is asinine; that would mean that aboriginal Australians and black Africans would be of the same 'race', even though they are separated by thousands of generations of breeding - more generations than black Africans are separated from white Europeans.

But even if you do define 'race' as visual characteristics, there are enough slight visual differences between Irish people and 'Caucasians' to consider them at the very least an offshoot, or 'cousin race'.