It’s entirely possible to put the contentious aspects of recent events aside and still conclude that it was a very good week for Ireland, and Irishness, a week capped by an event that has achieved a level of cultural capture that most can only dream of: St Patrick’s Day.
The most powerful nation on earth made its usual fuss of our national holiday, the White House dyeing its fountain for the occasion and bedecking many of its cities’ streets with green (and famously some of its waterways, too). The current and former US presidents acknowledged the significance of the day, in person and in posting, while CBS noted that “Guinness is experiencing an unprecedented ‘golden age’ in America, chugging its way to become the fastest growing imported beer in the U.S,” ahead of the March 17 festivities.
Some might scoff at the last one, but it seems noteworthy when homegrown Irish industry soars to new heights, especially in its 266th year of brewing. All the more so in an age of renewed anxiety about the country’s dependence on foreign direct investment, and its apparently ongoing low levels of native business dynamism.
The Taoiseach was offered, despite multiple flashpoints with the new US administration, his usual face-to-face meetings with President Trump and Vice-President Vance, amid a whirlwind tour that saw both Micheál Martin and many senior Irish figures offered direct access to the governors and officials of some of America’s most prominent states, like Texas and New York.
Revelry was not confined to the Emerald Isle and the United States, however. I saw this morning a video of the Caribbean territory Montserrat’s parade, as well as those parades and festivities that took place in London, Melbourne, Toronto, Mexico City and more. No doubt that list will come as little surprise to many Gript readers, given that all of those places celebrate St Patrick’s Day every year, and yet it should come as a surprise. What good fortune have we that Irishness and a key originator of our national image are celebrated worldwide every year? What other nation enjoys such esteem?
Which is why it’s all the more important that we defend the uniqueness of St Patrick’s Day and acknowledge what it truly stands for, rather than water it down to the point that it could be a celebration of any other country, or any other cause.
I got precisely that sense, and a concurrent shiver down my spine, as I read the Taoiseach’s comment that St Patrick’s Day is a day “rooted in community, humanity, friendship and fellowship”. Now, in the spirit of charity, it must be acknowledged that the Taoiseach’s formulation came in response to Conor McGregor’s White House visit, but I nevertheless thought it a missed opportunity to note what, exactly, St Patrick’s Day is truly about.
Because as mentioned above, what event that is popularly engaged in couldn’t be described as being “rooted in community, humanity, friendship and fellowship”? No doubt the Hindu festival of Diwali or the Islamic month of Ramadan could equally be described as such, given their communal, human (?), friendly and companionable natures.
There’s nothing wrong with appealing to those things that everyone can get behind, rather than to those things that are unique and therefore potentially divisive, but the concern is that if you only do that, as our thought-leaders currently do, then you risk losing that which you have because you no longer know what exactly it is that you have. For all of the reasons outlined at the beginning of this article, that would be a disaster for Ireland when it comes to St Patrick’s Day.
Lest you think, reader, that this is all so much hair-splitting, consider a topic that I’ve been reading about again in recent days, one that reveals the diluting danger of settling on agreeable platitudes without working your way to the meat of the matter: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Written up in the exhausted aftermath of the most destructive conflict the world has ever seen, the Second World War, the Declaration’s architects based it on the sparse – but obviously, entirely agreeable – base of shared respect for human dignity.
Absent any more agreement about the origin of that inherent dignity and the worldview and framework that necessarily arise from that, the vague language has been easily weaponised, by those who over the course of decades have managed to derive such things as a right to abortion and LGBT rights, through which much of the modern sexuality madness has entered into discussion, from the room to manoeuvre provided by the Universal Declaration’s ambiguous wording. This relates to St Patrick’s Day in that, if at some point you don’t define precisely – or as precisely as you can – what you have or what you’re dealing with, it will unavoidably become something else.
St Patrick’s Day is primarily a celebration of that titanic patron of Ireland as we have her today: St Patrick, who is understood as the driving force behind the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, an event and process that has given us the country we know and love. If we’re to broaden St Patrick’s Day out beyond that, we might say that it’s a celebration of Irishness, which is why other countries don our (superficial) trappings for a day – green, Guinness, shamrocks, leprechaun costumes and more.
Which is why the domestic blending of St Patrick’s Day with, for example, Pride themes, with the obligatory trans-float passing through Dublin’s streets, or the prominent positioning of Palestinian flags smack-bang in the city centre on Ha’Penny bridge, is only to the diminishment of this great cultural festival. It is the one day of the year that even a patriotism-phobic establishment ought to see the value in tradition-and-heritagemaxxing.
C.S. Lewis summed up what I’m trying to express here better than I ever could, when he wrote of his desire in various letters to experience various cultures and places in their authentic forms, rather than through the homogenising lens forced upon us in an increasingly globalised – and commercialised – age.
In celebrating St Patrick’s Day, the world is celebrating Irishness and its roots. There is an apparently endless appetite for it, coming around year after year without fail, through political and diplomatic ups and downs. Let us continue to provide it for them, rather than offering them an experience they can get, quite literally, anywhere else.