St Patrick’s Day means one thing to me

It’s a memory. Everything else I know about St Patrick’s Day is subordinate to this. I have no idea why this memory imprinted itself so strongly on Tiny Léan, but there we are.

I’m in my grandmother’s house, in what must be the late 1970s, because I really am very small.

We’re all getting ready to go out, and I know it’s a special day because I’m wearing my Sunday best although it’s not Sunday.

Remember those white cotton knee socks with the scalloped edges and the fancy lacy holes? Well, those. With buckled shoes. I’m a three-foot fashion icon.

We’re going to Mass, it turns out, and before we go, we all pin a handful of shamrock to our coats – actual cut bunches of the plant, a heap of tiny green leaves just beginning to wilt. My coat is blue wool.

Both the shamrock and the mid-week Mass mean that it’s St Patrick’s Day.

Bleak

Throughout my childhood, St Patrick’s Day was a bleak occasion. It’s in March, of course, so Dublin is usually cold and/or rainy.

And it’s in the middle of Lent, which in twentieth-century Ireland was a pretty big deal, especially for schoolchildren.

It’s also a holy day of obligation, which means Catholics must go to Mass. (I was brought up mildly Catholic; I got over it.)

In school they went on and on about snakes and bonfires and how St Patrick converted the pagans and became our first bishop. We sang “Christ on my right hand” and “Dóchas linn, Naomh Pádraig”, and drew crayon pictures of the man himself in his green robe and pointy episcopal hat, stamping on a sheepish-looking snake. His curly gold crozier was fun to draw (although possibly, now I think of it, a screaming anachronism).

The parade was just baffling. I couldn’t see the tiniest shred of purpose to it.

If memory serves I only attended in person two or three times, when I was small enough that it was mostly legs and bottoms and too much noise.

In other years we watched it on TV: a slow drizzly serpent of trudging musicians, interspersed with inexpertly decorated flat trucks, each prominently displaying the name of some uninspiring limited company, full of goosepimply people who hadn’t dressed for the weather, waving and dancing (to stave off hypothermia, perhaps?).

It’s all different now

Some time in the mid-1990s, as Ireland began to uncurl itself from under the merciless heel of the church, the holiday was transformed into a multi-day *!*!*!*FESTIVAL*!*!*!* (ah, you’d miss the blink tag all the same), full of creative energy and innovation and colour, with funfairs, lectures, walking tours, street theatre, storytelling, live music, dancing, eating and (yes, obviously) drinking.

The parade, from what I see on TV, is unimaginably better than it used to be.

Sadly, we haven’t been able to fix the weather, but the holiday has morphed into a celebration of much that is good about modern Ireland.

The green beer and the leprechaun hats and the “kiss me, I’m Irish” are irrelevant in all this, by the way. You do see them around, but they’re essentially Irish-American, reimported over here as the cultural hegemony solidified.

Then again, it’s fair to say that the popularity of St Patrick’s Day outside Ireland is what prompted the shift away from the grey, cheerless pomposities of my youth. (And you know what? If the price of that is an increase in drunk people wearing orange nylon wigs staggering around my home city every March, I’ll take it.)

Not this year, though

Not in 2020. Because in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the government has cancelled the festival altogether. “The Irish have cancelled St Patrick’s Day” sounds like the punchline to some vaguely problematic joke, but it’s real. We’re doing this. (And the rest of it – school closures, working from home, etc.)

So stay safe, stay home, wash your hands – and despite everything, I hope you have a happy St Patrick’s Day.