When I quickly copied their actions, I smiled and realised this was about as American as an Irishman can possibly get.

I guess things started to get serious between myself and this country somewhere between 9/11 and the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

That was roughly the time I found myself repeatedly defending America's honour in arguments, most of which were with my compatriots back home. Suddenly, I was reacting to the kind of standard-issue insults that never bothered me before. I didn't do anything rash like try to take out citizenship but I detected a not so subtle change in my attitude towards my adopted home. Once you become that defensive about a place, you know the casual affair is on its way to turning into a marriage.

Last week marked the seventh anniversary of the day I swapped an apartment in Dun Laoghaire for life in a seaside town on Long Island.

Conveniently up the road from where my wife Cathy grew up, it's a quaint enough place. Nobody bats an eyelid at the old woman around the corner taking her gecko for walks, the sign outside the Veteran of Foreign Wars facility is regularly repainted so everybody can read "We will never forgive you Hanoi Jane Fonda" and the fire department cheerfully announce births on the notice board outside the station.

In a period when the nation has been convulsed by the Florida recount fiasco, the attack on the Twin Towers, and involvement in two wars, there has been one bizarre constant since I arrived. Each time I go back to Cork, I am informed Ireland is becoming more and more like America. When I ask how this can possibly be the case, the answer is always some amalgam of traffic, working hours and commuting horror stories. And that's where I have a problem. The portrait of work-obsessed drones wasting their lives on freeways is just one of the many, lazy stereotypes incorrectly foisted upon this country.

I don't know what the figures are for those unfortunate enough to be trying to get in and out of Dublin each day but the average commute where I live is 22 minutes.

The longest average commute in America is just over 42. Sure, there are lunatics doing twice and three times those amounts but they are few and far between. Beyond the movie cliche of benighted grey men and women chained to desks, trying desperately to shin their way up the corporate ladder, the majority of people I know somehow manage to strike a nice balance between home and work.

I know this because, apart from anything else, they are constantly knocking off early for their kids' sporting fixtures. They have to. When a child registers for any team here, one parent must be present for the duration of every training session and game.

This can lead to a different set of issues as some of them get, ahem, a little too involved from the sidelines but there's certainly no faulting the desire to place their little darling's fledgling soccer career ahead of professional commitments.

This is such an endemic part of culture that not being in attendance without a good excuse is a major social faux pas. Better to annoy the boss by skiving off than risk getting the name of a deadbeat dad.

The erroneous notion that Americans live to work rather than work to live is a creation of the same Hollywood mythmakers that refuse to accept it's possible to be happy and fulfilled in suburbia. And therein lies the crux. Too many people have gained a warped view of this place through cinema, television and other media. It only takes a ridiculously biased Michael Moore documentary or a long weekend shopping in Manhattan to afford some individuals a keen, in-depth knowledge of this entire society. Imagine an American spending a weekend cossetted in the Westbury Hotel, tramping up and down Grafton Street, and deciding that gave them the authority to pontificate about modern Ireland.

With the re-election of Bush, an extra four million or so Christians voted in battleground states to reelect somebody with similar views to themselves (shock, horror) and suddenly, in the eyes of the world, America became a country where religious maniacs were imposing their faith through the machinery of the government. The bizarre thing about that widely held belief was how much it jarred with my personal experience.

They take the separation of church and state very seriously around here. My eldest son attends a public school where any mention of religion . . . outside of a comparative religions class . . . would be enough to get the teacher suspended and most likely dismissed. Since the taxpayers fund the institution, it is forbidden to promote any religion within the walls.

Of course, there's a curious downside to this. The children wear costumes and walk in a Harvest Parade rather than a Halloween Parade since the latter has a religious origin. Christmas parties become holiday parties. If the religious right is in charge, they have yet to follow the Irish example and place crucifixes on the walls of the classrooms.

There are longer-standing misconceptions about Americans that need to be addressed too. Aren't they an insular people, most of whom don't even have passports? Well, yes, and no. They don't travel abroad that much, but have you seen the size of this place? It's 3,000 miles from sea to shining sea and that's without figuring in the far-flung outposts of Hawaii and Alaska. From New York to San Francisco is roughly the same distance as Dublin to Tehran. How many Irish people make that trek regularly? Probably far less per capita than the amount of Americans crossing the Atlantic to visit their ancestral plot in Kerry each summer.

It's worth mentioning as well that this is such a diverse country there's at least a dozen different nations gathered together under the big gaudy stars and stripes umbrella. Travelling from the city of Philadelphia down to a small town in deepest Georgia is the equivalent of visiting a foreign land. Anybody who's ventured into the flyover states of the midwest will testify they are truly a land apart. They might speak the same language but everything from the cuisine to the cultural attitudes is way, way different from most of what you encounter on the coasts.

The insularity knock is part of a wider thesis that might be labelled "the dumb Americans". Again, just to clarify, there are plenty of pig-ignorant Americans. Just like there are plenty of pig-ignorant Irish. Do more of them veg in front of the telly than their counterparts in Dublin?

Hard to say. All I know is the Irish broadsheets appear to take trash like Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City a little more seriously than their American equivalents. And unlike here, Irish intellectuals don't have three channels (C-Span 1, 2 and 3) devoted exclusively to discussion of politics and books.

Nobody's saying America is perfect or anything. It's always a tad disconcerting of a Saturday morning to see a couple of goons with crossbows and shotguns walking into the woods to go hunting deer and I'm not thrilled that the legal drinking age of 21 means more highschool kids in this town smoke pot of a weekend than sneak cans of Budweiser. Of course, St Patrick's Day should be banned, I could do without having to buy a club membership to access the beach and I'll scream if I hear one more person describe somebody passing when they've actually died.

For all that, I find them to be a sincere and open people enjoyably devoid of hang-ups about illnesses like depresconditions must have been like at the Tower of Babel after God took offence. Every ethnicity, colour and language is waiting around for the chance to plead with the authorities for the opportunity to live here permanently.

Before my green card was sorted out, I had to endure that wait a few times. On each occasion, I lamented my failure to apply for that piece of paper when we lived in Dubiln but I also thought a lot on those dawn shifts about what a horrible place America must be. Why else would half the planet be lining up for the chance to get in here?