I WAS brought up with two heroes the Queen and the IRA.

Mam would've been out there this week waving her Union Jack.

She was the spitting image of HM, mimicking the royal hairdo (minus unaffordable tiara).

Her Majesty, I was assured, boasted to her courtiers, "My subject Monica Logan and I are two peas in a pod."

This seemed OK, even to a lad who believed that royalty and Vera Lynn were so different from us commoners that they didn't have the apparatus to spend a penny like us.

IRA idolatry came from dad, who wasn't at all partial to Lizzie, but knew which side his bread was buttered on.

He rather eulogised Ireland's Eamon De Valera and the IRA's Easter Rising around Dublin's GPO, while cursing the Queen's Black & Tan regiment recruited from "the scum of the earth and Strangeways Prison".

Such conflicts of loyalty are second-nature to immigrants like us.

Our lot came over in the infamous Potato Famine caused by the dirty English landlords who robbed us sorry!

That's dad rising in me. Now, where was I..?

Ah, yes conflicting loyalty. At least it's all been good practice for getting religion.

As with four-fifths of us, God is real, and the King wants our loyalty.

But so does every earthly Tom, Dick and Harry.

Sorting out who gets it is the full-time job of God's subjects.