I’ve always felt a deal of antipathy towards St Patrick’s Day, my least favourite time of year. I can trace my discomfort with the national holiday back to childhood. I still recall standing, shivering, with my aunt and uncle and fair-haired cousins on O’Connell Street in Dublin, behind a barricade of mountainous men and women in coats swollen from the rain, while an unseen brass band played and the occasional baton, launched from the practised grip of an invisible majorette, twirled above our heads.
Sitting on someone’s shoulders and finally being able to actually see something, I still didn’t really understand why people stood for hours in the drizzle to view a battalion of Massey Ferguson tractors, a gaggle of men with bagpipes or a dancing cheese slice on a float.
Who knew that sugar-beet production and star-spangled Chicagoan majorettes had such a vaunted place at the national feast?
I wasn’t entirely sure why the crowd was moved to applaud a parade of men and women in military green banging their drums and tooting their horns and high-stepping along the rain-slick street, their St Bernard skin-coloured nylons snagging on the hems of their sturdy skirts. (All right, it was 1972, so the boy soldiers probably weren’t wearing 15-denier hose under their fatigues, but you get the picture.)
My own parents never brought me to the parade. They were too busy throwing accusations and grilled tomatoes at one another; too concerned with bucking societal norms to go and celebrate them.
I may have been confused by the whole occasion, but I was also grateful to my kindly uncle and phlegmatic aunt, not just for the sprig of shamrock pinned to my chest but also for opening up a window in my little-girl head to some idea of national identity.
“You are Irish!” the parade seemed to say. “And Irish people like cheese slices and chunky cows and knock-kneed boys shivering on the bandstand, and big-thighed majorettes all the way from the land of the free, and marching soldiers, their gaze unflinching, banging on their big bass drums!”
Heretofore, I thought everyone in the country drank gin on tall bar stools, threw the bills in the fire and wrote long letters of apology to the unpaid milkman. Indeed, based on my observations from my first decade on Earth, living somewhat precariously in a north Dublin suburb, I thought that all anybody ever really really wanted, or indeed needed, was a brand-new chequebook, a Labrador, a divorce and a hostess trolley.
Who knew that sugar-beet production and star-spangled Chicagoan majorettes had such a vaunted place at the national feast? Who knew that all I knew was so flimsy, irrelevant and baseless in the face of those weighty combine harvesters roaring now past the GPO, where letters are posted and blood was once spilt.
I’m interested in schisms, in those moments when you feel separated from the life you’re living, when it feels like everyone else can hear a rhythm that you just can’t catch. And in this time of enforced isolation, many of us are feeling more than usually out on a limb.
In the past decade or more, as we all know, the St Patrick’s Festival has changed utterly, the 15-denier footwork replaced by a diverse cultural line-up. It is an event that no longer floods this particular viewer with a mossy-green sadness.
I was looking at the website for this year’s virtual festival, starting today, March 12th, and running until Wednesday, March 17th, featuring more than 100 live-streamed events that can be viewed worldwide through the St Patrick’s Festival TV (SPF TV, stpatricksfestival.ie) channel.
A cursory glance at the line-up made me marvel at what it would be like to be a 10-year-old having a first brush with collective identity by doing virtual yoga in the National Gallery, under the bemused gaze of the portraiture. I certainly don’t remember an imperative to “enjoy mindful connection through art” being at the top of anyone’s agenda circa 19-stop-your-nonsense.
Anyway, before I go out and tiptoe through the tulips, I wanted to tell you that at 7pm on St Patrick’s Day, the Abbey Theatre will stream an event on its YouTube channel called Home: Part One. The piece sees actors and public figures read testimonies from survivors of the mother and baby homes, with music performed by Mary Coughlan.
I’ll be tuning in; a day that celebrates and examines our national identity seems an opportune time to reflect on the lived experiences of some of our too-often-silenced citizens.