Corned Beef and what????

I'm mostly Irish, mostly being about two-thirds. My paternal grandfather came from Ireland. My paternal grandmother was Irish-Welsh. My maternal grandfather was a mix of German-Irish. My maternal grandmother was German.
So given this, I always found it odd as I grew up that the only person in my family who actually liked corned beef and cabbage was my mother. My father never ate it. Neither did his mother and father. Yet, it was so Irish. Personally I can't stand the stuff.
To be honest, it never seemed like Irish food to me.
So about 10 years ago, I had a chance to sit down and talk to the woman who was the Irish consulate for the United States assigned to San Francisco. I asked her if there was a lot of corned beef and cabbage in Ireland. She told me she had never heard of corned beef until she came to the United States. Also, she couldn't stand the stuff.
WHAT????, I said.
"We usually eat ham on St. Patrick's Day," she told me. "The more traditional meal is to make a lunch of bacon sandwiches, put it in a picnic basket and go watch a local soccer game."
This intrigued me. How could someone from Ireland never have heard of corned beef?
So I did some research.
Turns out the cabbage part is the only Irish part of the meal. Cabbage, which can grow in cooler weather, became a staple of the poor as a basis for soup. It was a great way to stretch a budget. So the Irish immigrants who came over to the United States in the late 1800s brought that with them.
Anyone who knows immigration history knows that the Irish neighborhoods quickly integrated with the Jewish and German neighborhoods. This little fact would cause a small problem for Uncle Sam by World War II. Some politicians wanted to also put German immigrants into concentration camps along with the Japanese but it was quickly pointed out that it would be too hard to distinguish the Germans from the Irish, as they all lived in the same areas.
I digress.
The Germans, specifically the Jewish German families that were forced out of Germany due to the growing antisemitism in Germany and Prussia, brought there own budget-stretching meal, which was corned beef.
Well, the Irish quickly learned that ham was (and still is) very expensive in the United States and was virtually impossible to buy for St. Patrick's Day. So they adopted corned beef from their neighbors.
As the Irish then started to move west from New York, they took the recipe with them, spreading it to other Irish enclaves in Boston, Chicago and so on.
In essence, the Irish appropriated a Jewish-German meal and made it their own. As a result, millions of Americans will eat corned beef and cabbage today, thinking that it's as Irish as Dublin.
The ultimate culture-clash, in my opinion.
Possibly the first teriyaki donut?

*I recently told this story to a co-worker and she all but accused me of making it up. So I found two Web pages last night that support this. They are here and here.