This day last year, this message went around on the newly created WhatsApp group for our street: “At 12 noon step out your front door and sing Óró ’Sé do Bheatha ’Bhaile”. And so at midday on that first strange St Patrick’s Day, when O’Connell Street stretched out unpatriotically silent and empty, we opened our front doors. Just a few of us at first, then more doors were cracked open.
It was unspoken, but if our voices soared high enough it was as though we might have been able to sing the pandemic away. We roared as Gaeilge at the sky and at the virus and at each other. An act of defiance, courage and solidarity. It seems quaint now. A memory from the days when we thought next year might be normal. Bless us and our innocence.
Welcome to another pandemic St Patrick’s Day. How long, as one of our most eminent poets, Paul Hewson, once asked, must we sing this song?
Last year, an older woman a few doors down brought out a bottle of whiskey and crystal tumblers that glinted in weak sunlight and we sang all the songs we could think of. Ireland’s Call. Song of Ireland. Ride On. Molly Malone.
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We sang sea shanties before they became trendy on TikTok. We sang our heads off and our hearts out. We sang to ward off our demons
There was something hopeful in the air back then along with all that fear and uncertainty. I can't speak for my entire street, but I don't think any of us thought we'd be here one year later marking St Patrick's Day with a rake of online events. (These are well worth checking out, by the way – I don't want to rain on anyone's virtual parade.)
What song to sing at the doors today after a year of this? Don’t ask me. I don’t feel like singing anymore.
Singing nights
Before the pandemic, I sang regularly with a group of friends. We used to get together for singing nights, we’d eat and drink and sing loud and long into the early morning in each other’s houses and we didn’t know how lucky we were. We sang John Grant and Sinéad O’Connor, A-ha and Tracy Chapman, Amanda Palmer and John Prine.
We sang sea shanties before they became trendy on TikTok. We sang our heads off and our hearts out, harmonies blending and vibrating. We sang to ward off our demons. We sang to soar above ourselves. We sang to put ourselves back together, the way some swim in the sea to become whole. We sang to do all of this, even before the world as we knew it fell apart.
Our singing sessions migrated to online meetings for a while. This worked for me, until it didn’t. The Zoom boffins haven’t figured out how to facilitate group singing yet. When you try to sing in a group on Zoom you are out of sync, a messy cacophony.
So what you do on a Zoom sing-song is you mute everyone else except the person singing the lead vocal and then you mute yourself and sing on your own. It’s not the same.
When my friend Anna sang her stunning version of the 1950s song Hares on a Mountain, I’d do a harmony that she couldn’t hear. It took a pandemic for me to properly understand that you can’t harmonise alone. To borrow the tree-falling analogy, if you sing a harmony but the person you are harmonising with can’t hear it, then did it even happen?
Apparently, he fell asleep on an iceberg in the Arctic and ended up on those west of Ireland rocks. He's wrecked, the poor creature, far from his comfort zone
Then I started singing more on my own, learning songs from Taylor Swift’s pandemic albums until the sound of my own voice began to grate. These days I prefer the music in the wind down on the Great South Wall, the tunes from the speaker on top of the coffee van where I get a warming, straight-from-the-packet oxtail soup after the walk to Poolbeg Lighthouse, one of the places in my 5km that still sparks joy.
Novelty
If there was a novelty to this global disaster, it wore off months ago. If there was adrenalin from being on red alert, it has fully seeped away.
I am one of those lucky enough to not have much to complain about, but you don’t have to be suffering yourself to feel the pain of others or be diminished by the boredom of the still-empty calendar.
Compassion fatigue is real too. After a year of trying to stand together apart, it might be time go inwards and replenish our resources instead of trying to draw from an empty well.
It seemed oddly fitting that this week a wandering walrus turned up on Valentia Island. I was moved by the sight of it. This giant animal, shivering and exhausted after his long, accidental journey. Apparently, he fell asleep on an iceberg in the Arctic and ended up on those west of Ireland rocks. He’s wrecked, the poor creature, out of sorts, far from his comfort zone.
I am the walrus.
You might be the walrus too.
They can sing, you know, walruses. They make their own sort of music. Walruses in the wild can sing non-stop for days at a time. Their song is so loud, sometimes a piercing train whistle, sometimes a tuneless grunt, and it can be heard from a distance of 10 miles away. Somebody has actually studied it.
I imagine the Valentia Island walrus singing in the middle of a vast ocean even as he was nearly spent, singing even as with the last reserves of his energy he manoeuvred himself up onto Irish rocks just in time for our national holiday.
How long must we sing this song?
We can sing. Sing a new song.