Happy St. Patrick's Day!

It's a day early, but St. Patrick's Day seems to have become a season in recent years, so I hope I'll be forgiven.

It was my tradition some years back to turn the background of this blog green for St. Patrick's Day, but I can no longer work out how to do it. The blogging platform is always changing. There probably is a way to do it, but I gave up after fifteen minutes.

I put together a St. Patrick's Day book display in the library. The theme I was given was "St. Patrick: An Icon of Irishness". But I made sure the top row were all about St. Patrick as an evangelist of Christ.

I could easily have included the St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin city centre as one of my crummy eighties memories. I think I only ever actually went to it once. It rained. The spirit of crass commercialism I described in that post was well and truly on display on the parade. Obviously, businesses are going to use parades to advertise. Nothing wrong with that. But back then, it was nothing BUT advertising, pretty much!

Everybody remembers the ubiquitous ATA Security floats, although I actually remembered them as ACA Security. The highlight of the parade, for me, was being squirted with a water pistol by a pirate.

Sure, it was better than nothing. But I have to admit that the St. Patrick's Day parade has become much better in recent times, with much more artistic, tasteful and elaborate floats. I've only ever watched it on TV since that year.

My St. Patrick's Day memories are not particularly special. My mother used to give us green and orange jelly with cream, to represent the tricolour. Or maybe that only happened once, I can't remember. Dinner was usually corned beef, potatoes, and cabbage, which I utterly hated. I don't remember ever going to Mass on St. Patrick's Day as a child.

The last poem my father wrote was about spending St. Patrick's Day in a hospital ward.

In the last seven or eight years, my personal tradition has been to read St. Patrick's Confession on the day, though I'll admit that in the last few years, it's only been a section of it.

Another St. Patrick's tradition on this blog is quoting De Valera's unfairly infamous St. Patrick's Day radio address from 1943-- although, in all honesty, it has become thoroughly rehabilitated in recent years. Sure, people still make snide references to "comely maidens dancing at the crossroads" (which he may or may not have actually said-- the original broadcast was not recorded), but nearly everyone who writes about the speech per se now admits that it has been unfairly lampooned.

When I was a teenager, however, it was still open season on it. I first encountered it on a bus shelter ad which quoted a fair chunk of it over a photograph of the Ballymun flats. (It wasn't clear who'd sponsored the ad, but it was obviously ironic in tone.) And it was even mocked in my school history book!

In any case, here it is:

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved. One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day. So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers. We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.

This has always seemed like a noble vision to me, even when I first encountered it, as an angry socialist teenager. I was confused by the hostility towards it.

One thing that does bother me a bit (and this belongs to the second half of the paragraph above, which is rarely quoted) is the conflation of Christianity with militant nationalism. This was an all-too-common practice at this time, its nadir perhaps coming when Patrick Pearse proclaimed the grave of Wolfe Tone to be holier than that of St. Patrick.

Although I admire the courage and devotion of the people who fought in 1916 and the War of Independence, and indeed in previous uprisings, and although stories about them will always have a grip on my imagination, I'm not at all convinced that they were justified. But then, I pretty much agree with Benjamin Franklin that "there never was a good war, or a bad peace". I tend to think World War II was not justified, and I'm almost certain World War One wasn't.

In any case, I wish you all a happy St. Patrick's Day.