DO YOU feel a sense of extreme excitement or desperate dread at the prospect of St Patrick’s Day? Furthermore, do you believe the national day celebrations will help to lift the national gloom?
If you’ve an opinion on these questions, researchers at University of Limerick (UL), Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and St Andrew’s University in Scotland are anxious to hear from you.
Prof Orla Muldoon, foundation chairwoman at UL’s department of psychology, said “evidence suggests that while the day provides a moment to showcase Irishness, this is not unproblematic”. She pointed out that festivals and carnivals and parades can “offer a sense of pride and a sense of belonging”, as well as serving as a major tourist attraction in cities like Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway.
“As part of a grieving process we come together at a funeral and wake, in the hope that it provides comfort or family renewal. Carnivals are often the vehicle through which people take control of the streets around them,” she said.
However, even in the same crowd, there is “no agreed notion of being Irish”, and the “clash between the old and new Irish can be writ large”.
Initial research has found that spectators at festival parades do not often welcome inclusion of the “new Irish” – although new cultures are now an integral part of many parades across the island.
Migrant groups can sometimes feel peripheral, and even unwelcome, at the events, in spite of the best efforts of authorities, her team notes.
The overconsumption of alcohol can also be an alienating factor, especially for young families. “Parents express concern about what this may communicate to their children about both our national day and our nationality,” Prof Muldoon said.
In Belfast, the “contested nature of national identity” can have an impact on the festivities, and a St Patrick’s parade has the potential to “divide, rather than unite” due to the presence of emblems traditionally associated with the republican community, she said.
Across the Atlantic, Irish-Americans in New York and Boston have long used the event to “reinvigorate an Irish identity in the new world”.
“St Patrick’s Day allows the Irish nation, in its widest sense, to wear, carry and drink the shamrock apparently in a common national enterprise. This masks, at least for a time, the very disparate understandings of what it means to be Irish from Brooklyn to Tallaght,” she said.
The joint research project into the impact of St Patrick’s Day is now in its third year, and the findings will be published in late June.
