In recent years there has been a great improvement in the St Patrick's Festival, with imaginative displays and performance artists adding great colour to the event - and this year festival organiser Maria Moynihan has plans to broaden the scope of the event, writes Shane Hegarty
St Patrick's Day may still be a green dot on the horizon, but not for St Patrick's Festival chief executive Maria Moynihan. "Every year before the Festival I say 'never again, I'm getting out of this'. Then straight after it I can't imagine doing anything else. When women talk about childbirth they forget the pain and just remember the euphoria. So when the euphoria kicks in, I'm okay." Even now, with the festival bearing down on her, when the only weekend she can appreciate is the one of March 17th, it is, she says, "the best job in the world". She has been three years in it, during which time the event has continued to transform itself radically. Where once the parade was a grey, limp, annual homage to drizzle, now it is vibrant and imaginative, the kind that leaves tourists delighted rather than disappointed, locals enthusiastic rather than dampened. This year will see an 80 per cent increase in the number of performers. It will also be only a focal point to a larger festival. Where last year there were 10 events over four days, this year there will be 85 over six.
If the growth of St Patrick's week has reflected a changing Ireland, then this year the festival will attempt to analyse and crystallise that change through the inaugural St Patrick's Symposium, Talking Irish. Over the opening day, speakers, including poverty campaigner Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, East Timor campaigner Tom Hyland, football manager Mick O'Dwyer, journalist Fintan O'Toole and Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy will join community groups, business people and artists in exploring our identity, the pluses and negatives of our success and where we go from here. Delegates will be coaxed along by actors from the Barabbas Theatre Company, and given inspiration by the artwork of Transition Year students as well as older people.
"It's a debate we would always have among ourselves at the festival anyway. What's it all about? Why are we doing this? What is our identity? Working on this, I meet so many people from other countries and they're trying to get a handle on it, while we Irish take it for granted. So we said, suppose we took it upon ourselves, as the focal point of the weekend celebration, to start with a debate." This is the centenary year of St Patrick's Day as a national holiday and, says Moynihan, the symposium is a chance to figure out what it is we're celebrating.
"Irish people don't take ownership of the day in the way that the diaspora do. That's because for many years it was a religious holiday here, while overseas it was a time of reflection and nostalgia and asserting your identity. So what are we celebrating? Ask people and you'll get a million different answers, but the consistent one is pride. So what is it we're proud of? And what is it we're not proud of?"
The organisers, she says, also took its cue from How The Irish Saved Civilisation, Thomas Cahill's book on how early Irish monks preserved important texts during the Dark Ages, and subsequently became a civilising influence on Europe. "We began to talk about really remarkable people, such as Tom Hyland and Bob Geldof, who have done incredible things on a global level. And we asked - and we're really being arrogant about the question - could Ireland save civilisation again? If we stopped to think about where society is going on a global level, could we be in the lead of that." Isn't that the problem? That we are a small nation with an inflated ego and that this symposium, no matter how laudable, will make little impact?
"We're not looking at this as if we're a small country. We're looking at it with our festival glasses on, that there's 70 million people worldwide claiming Irish heritage. So we're coming at it from the angle that Irish identity means a lot to them and that maybe in some small way it governs their communities and societies, and this is where Ireland saving civilisation comes in."
She doesn't expect easy answers, or that the question of Irish identity will be answered in one day. "Irish identity is not something that will be easily defined. The Irishness of the diaspora and the Irishness of the Irish, for instance, are at polar extremes. We find so often through the festival that we cannot relate, that we have no common language." It will be, she adds, a rare chance for art, business and society to sit down in a room together and hammer out a vision of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
"It can't be a love-in, or there is something seriously wrong." It could be argued that the symposium has made its job harder by not including any immigrant groups or speakers. If Irish identity is in flux, how come these elements of the new Ireland are absent? "Throughout the festival in general we don't seek representation for the sake of representation. We have to be very careful to make sure that we are not an issues-based or political event. So we would have immigrant groups or other groups represented through the various events for what they can do and not what they are. You can marginalise people by bringing them as representative of a community, just as you can by leaving them out." Even at this early stage, she insists, the Irish attitude towards immigrants has been a regular source of debate. "We don't set quotas, but we very much hope that it will be woven through the event."
Moynihan's tenure has been marked by a deliberate three-year plan: to encourage street theatre and bolster participation in the parade, to solidify sponsorship and to widen the range of events. How much of that plan does she believe has been achieved? "I don't mean to be cocky but pretty much all of it. It all seems to have happened this year. This really is the big one. We've managed to develop new events, sustain others, bring the sponsorship to a level where it's very sustainable and to build a certain appreciation for the festival." The longer-term aim is to continue our reclamation of our national holiday, so that Dublin on St Patrick's Day ranks alongside Edinburgh in August or Rio's Mardi Gras. It is also, she says, about the wellbeing of the capital city. She cites last summer's Paris Plage, when a temporary beach was put on the Seine, as an example of what a public event can do for the mood as well as the finances of a city. "If only Ireland could get to a level where it's okay to have fun, where it's not frivolous or trivial. Look at Paris.
"There's economic justification for doing it, but it can also overcome social divisions and improve the health of the city and its people." Insurance costs are the main threat to the vision. The festival's own premiums have this year risen 50 per cent for some events, and rising costs for their suppliers are also having knock-on effects. It makes no sense, she argues, when they have put every health and safety requirement in place.
"Everything has been thought of and yet costs keep going up." On St Patrick's Day itself, Maria Moynihan will spend the day looking after journalists and sponsors. "If something has to come to me at that stage, if I even have to know about it, then it's a serious crisis." She'll then spend the following week signing cheques "like a zombie", forgetting the pain and planning next year's festival while many of us haven't even shaken off the hangover from this year's.
St Patrick's Festival Symposium: Talking Irish takes place in Dublin Castle on March 11th. For information, contact 01-6763205
