ST. PATRICK'S DAY... SOAP STYLE!

St Patrick’s Day is a perfect time to ask: Just how lucky have the Irish been on American soap-operas?

These days, daytime’s most prominent Irish family are the Bradys on Days of Our Lives. (Even if one the Brady kids, Bo, was actually fathered not by patriarch Shawn, but by a Greek named Kiriakis.) We know they’re Irish because they run a pub, and because two of their boys are cops. Also because, in 2007-8, we got a whole storyline based on flashbacks to the “old country.”

Novice nun Colleen Brady fell for doting dad Santo DiMera (Colleen’s little brother, Shawn, was buds with Santo’s son, Stefano). When she found out Santo’s wife wasn’t quite as dead as he’d led her to believe, Colleen fled back into the arms of the church. Santo interrupted Colleen taking her vows, and she fled for a second time – right off the edge of a convenient cliff. Or, at least, that’s what her family assumed. There was a cliff, there was her nun’s habit. What else could they possibly think?

How about that a pregnant Colleen fled to Argentina (they’ve got Catholics there, too), where she placed her son in an orphanage, only to have him given up for adoption without Colleen’s permission. That son turned out to be John Black, who’d once believed he was long-lost Brady son Roman. Then he thought he was Forrest Alamain. Now, at long last, John knew who he really was! He was Ryan Brady, who’d been adopted by the Alamain family. No wonder the Bradys had long accepted him as one of their own. He was one of their own! Talk about the luck of the Irish!

Except that, in 2013, John learned that Colleen had been lied to. John wasn't her son. Colleen's son had died as an infant. It was all a bunch of blarney, after all.

Read more at "Entertainment Weekly!"