Happy Ivy Day!

Regular readers (who, unaccountably, actually exist) will know that I have a fondness for neglected traditions.

Today used to be marked as Ivy Day, a day to remember the Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell.

You can read all about Parnell here, if you don't know about him already.

There's still a ceremony every year in Glasnevin cemetery. I've never made it myself.

Parnell has never been one of my heroes, particularly, but I do like Yeats's poem in tribute to him (the third verse is especially, which is perfection itself):

Come gather round me, Parnellites,
And praise our chosen man,
Stand upright on your legs awhile,
Stand upright while you can,
For soon we lie where he is laid
And he is underground;
Come fill up all those glasses
And pass the bottle round.

And here's a cogent reason
And I have many more,
He fought the might of England
And saved the Irish poor,
Whatever good a farmer's got
He brought it all to pass;
And here's another reason,
That Parnell loved a lass.

And here's a final reason,
He was of such a kind
Every man that sings a song
Keeps Parnell in his mind
For Parnell was a proud man,
No prouder trod the ground,
And a proud man's a lovely man
So pass the bottle round.

The Bishops and the Party
That tragic story made,
A husband that had sold his wife
And after that betrayed;
But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell loved his lass.

The famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce is also worth reading, but is too long to reproduce here. These days we don't argue about politics at the dinner table. We talk about house prices and Game of Thrones instead. I'm not sure it's an improvement.