Ireland looks inwards and outwards on St Patrick's Day, celebrating Irish identity and communicating it to other peoples. The holiday is a powerful symbol of Ireland's religious traditions and of our contemporary society.
It has a remarkable outreach to the Irish abroad, to their host societies and to the wider world. In recent years these dimensions have been projected even more strongly by a growing internationalisation of Ireland's economic, cultural and political life. This is fully reflected today in the spread of ministerial involvement with Irish communities abroad - and in the rapid flow of world politics through Ireland's presidency of the European Union, as the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, meets President Bush today in the White House.
St Patrick remains an appropriate figure to express these changing realities. He has been reimagined to fit them, as is often the case with such national symbols. A paradoxical figure, he came to Ireland from late Roman Britain first as a boy-slave, tending swine on the slopes of Slemish, only to return later as a bishop who showed a masterful ability to marry older Gaelic and druidic religious practices with the new Christianity. Continuity and change are built into his heritage. This makes him a suitably inclusive figure for a country seeking to reconcile different religious and political traditions, each of which revere him, and to normalise relations with the neighbouring and previously dominant island from which he came. Nor is it too fanciful to compare St Patrick's familiarity with late Roman Europe to Ireland's current intensive engagement with an enlarging European Union.
Mr Ahern visits Washington today after as intense a few days of change in European politics as any in recent times. The bombing atrocities in Madrid, together with the Spanish government's mismanagement of news about who was responsible for them, produced a political earthquake in Sunday's general election with profound implications for European and world politics. The new prime minister elect, Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has attacked the war in Iraq, warned that he will withdraw Spanish troops from there and hinted he is now ready to make a compromise on the EU's constitutional treaty. The bombings and their victims will dominate debate on how European states should confront terrorism at meetings later this week and next, as concern grows that they have determined the outcome of a democratic election.
Ireland has access to the highest levels of US political leadership today by virtue of its national day. From Mr Bush's point of view there is political purchase from this meeting with Irish-Americans in an election year, just as from the EU-US summit in Ireland being planned for the end of June, when many of these issues will continue to be discussed.
This political engagement has become an inseparable part of Ireland's national day. It should remind us that relations with the Irish abroad should not be taken for granted but must be continually renewed.