RESPONDING 'no comment' to a question about your nationality might be a tempting answer in the north, but one Co Armagh centenarian has more reason than most to be confused.
Billy Duffy was born in the US in 1913, moved to Ireland before it was partitioned and has lived in Northern Ireland since its foundation.
Mr Duffy, who recently turned 103, was also effectively ignored by three nations on his 100th birthday due to the unique circumstances.
His daughter Gráinne Kelly told The Irish News: "The US authorities claimed that because he wasn't living in the US he wasn't entitled to their bounty and as he wasn't born here, he didn't get official recognition from the Queen or President Higgins.
"President Higgins did, however, invite him down to Dublin for tea and biscuits."
Ms Kelly joked that her father now says "no comment when asked his nationality."
Ms Kelly said: "He used to consider himself American but after being refused recognition on his birthday, he just felt he didn't belong anywhere. He never went back to the US after he moved here and the furthest he travelled was going to Blackpool for the day."
Mr Duffy was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, and moved to Co Armagh, the home of his parents, when his mother died after being hit by a tram when he was just eight years old.
Ms Kelly said: "My grandmother had emigrated to the US, but decided to come back because she missed my grandfather - without telling him - and came home to find that he had gone to the US because he missed her.
"They got married in the US. She was only around 26 when she was killed. My grandfather decided to return home to the Tandragee area with my father and his two siblings and remarried here.
She added: "He remembers his father getting up early in the US to get the newspaper at the time of the 1916 Rising. He was in Ireland before partition and remembers it well."
After staying in school - where he was taught by the father of Seamus Mallon, later the area's MP - until the age of 17 to "avoid conscription by the US", Mr Duffy turned his hand to a variety of jobs, before becoming a dairy farmer, only retiring at the age of 80.
Ms Kelly said: "He used to have cows and walk with them and only sold them when they built a new roundabout in Tandragee, which made things difficult."
He met his wife, Susan, at a church disco and the pair have been married for almost seven decades.
The couple have eight children, two boys and six girls, and Mrs Duffy will celebrate her own birthday in July, turning 83.
A firm fan of this newspaper's cryptic crossword on a Saturday, which his daughter describes as "impossible", Mr Duffy "always aims to have it completed by Tuesday".
A massive family celebration was held in Banbridge to mark his 100th birthday, with relatives of all generations present.
Ms Kelly said: "He likes listening to gaelic and hurling games and loves reading and learning languages, and only last year started to learn Swahili."
