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On
March 17th 2004, the Saint Patrick's Day Festival is scheduled
to attract the green-eyed attention of some two hundred and seventy
six million people worldwide. From Atlantic City to Zanzibar and
Shilelagh to Ballydehob every grizzle-backed wolfhound, whiskey-swiller
and shamrock-bellied tap dancer on the globe is going to be drafted
in to celebrate a week of increasingly outlandish behaviour in honour
of Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. This is a curious phenomenon
indeed. A supreme pancake as the great Flann O'Brien might
have said.
Now,
there was a time when I'd have to go into a lengthy explanation
about St. Pat and how he started out as a Welshman in Roman Britain,
was captured by rogue Irish pirates at the age of 16 and put to
work as a shepherd boy in Ulster, chanced upon a copy of the Holy
Bible, escaped from his captors and spent the remainder of his life
gallivanting around the countryside shouting at snakes, picking
shamrocks, knocking pagan kings about with his crozier and generally
convincing an island of druid-worshipping heathens to tune into
the words of a carpenter's son from the Sea of Galilee.
These
days I'm not so sure. Mention Saint Patrick and most people
think not of Galilee but of Guinness, great big black and green
pints of stout pouring from taps in 125,000 pubs across the planet.
I'm inclined to think this is an American legacy more than
anything else. After all, it was the 19th century New Yorkers who
(establishing a trend that still flows in Hollywood) turned Saint
Nicholas from a scary old man who rode around on a white horse kidnapping
naughty children into the jovial old cove with a twinkle in his
eye and a penchant for reindeers and chimneys. So too, Saint Patrick
- or at least, Saint Patrick's Day - has been
stripped of all his austere Christian virtues and converted into
a two-foot dwarf with a taste for green beer.
It's
difficult to know but, aside from the sometimes overwhelming vulgarity
of the occasion, I don't think many in Ireland are complaining.
We'd been quietly celebrating the day for donkey's years,
fitting in as many pints as we could either side of Holy Hour and
watching in awe as our Brethren across the Ocean took our Patron
Saint as their own. The New York Parade, which began in 1762, was
the oldest and best of them all. It's bewildering and impressive
to watch the floats and marching bands glide through crowds of black
and white kids, their faces painted green, white and orange, the
rat-a-tat-tat of drums, the tootling of pipes, a chorus of beautiful
young lasses kicking their heels into the sky and an elderly Irish
screen goddesses waving Queen-like from the main float.
To
my mind, the great thing about Saint Paddy's Day is it gives
each and every one of us an excuse to go out and act like a complete
wally for the day. And I encourage you to take advantage of this
opportunity. Dye your armpits green, march like a giraffe, throw
a spud at the deputy mayor, dance like you've a dozen hornet's
stinging your kneecaps, sing like you're winning and don't
think about tomorrow because tomorrow never comes.
The
world could do with more days like this. It's essential that
we the people are allowed to sometimes forget about the complexities
and ironies of life. Moreover, it's my absolute belief that
we the people deserve to party. I know the world is by no means
the happy globe it should be. Indeed, for most of the people who
live on this planet, it's still a hideously unfair place with
no end of hard luck going around.
But
look at it this way. Ireland was once a pretty awful place to live.
Back in Saint Paddy's day, for instance, a man or woman would
be doing extremely well to blow out 33 candles on a birthday cake
what with so many axe-wielding psychopaths, snarly-toothed wolves,
pestilential diseases and one thing and another. Fast forward to
just two hundred years ago and we had a civil war that left 30,000
people dead in three months. One hundred and fifty years ago, our
population was halved from eight million to four million when a
catastrophic shortage of potatoes sent every second citizen packing
either to the distant shores of America and Australia, or away on
to the Great Big Free Bar in the Sky. Last century, we endured two
world wars, a third for independence, another civil war for good
measure and God knows how many other skirmishes and outrages that
prompted our economy to keep nose-diving and our citizens to keep
fleeing. It was, I repeat, a pretty awful place to live.
And
now? In 2004 anno domini? Well, begob and begorragh but ain't
we a sight for sore eyes?! We've a booming economy, our towns
and cities have gone all cosmopolitan, there's a merry band
fiddling away in every third pub, a cash machine in every village
and I could go on ad infinitum but, all up, we have never ever had
it so good.
There
are some who, perhaps justifiably, mourn this new affluence because
it inevitably breeds a busier, vainer, less accommodating society.
But that is always the price of prosperity. But isn't it a
fine thing that a small island, one of the most impoverished in
Europe until three decades ago, has so abruptly managed to conquer
the ancient and eternal gloom that hitherto drowned all our optimism
in sooty black, rain-filled clouds. We had a little help from our
friends, of course, and there's still a certain amount of
mopping up to do between the jigs and the reels, but for now things
are looking good. Indeed, when I drive across this country looking
left and right and blanking out the bungalows and what not, I sometimes
find myself thinking: "Well, what do you know?! It sure looks
like we've cracked it". And so maybe, just maybe, the
point of Saint Paddy's Day should be that when the future
looks utterly dire and the past seems as black as your cat, you
have to remember that you never know what's around the corner
and maybe, just maybe, it might be, just might be, what we the people
refer to as the Good Times.
until this time next month...
Best Wishes,
Conor B & Turtle.
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