An Irishman's guide to celebrating St. Patrick's Day in Ireland

St. Patrick's Day Parade in Belfast City

Hail glorious Saint Patrick, dear Saint of our isle! Of course St Patrick’s Day is a momentous one in the world calendar (there aren’t many other national holidays that prompt an audience with the President or turn rivers a different color) and it’s a day to be savored. But before you do, consider the following things to make the most of the national day.

If you don’t get to the city by midday, don’t expect to move freely

It can be hard to get all your ducks in a row on St Patrick’s Day. There’s no school so there are more people to coordinate, and harder to get them out of bed, to say nothing of the inevitable last-minute-scramble-for-shamrocks-down-the-garden-to-attach-to-your-lapel. But if you’re not in the city early enough to nab a decent place for the parades, all you’re likely to see is the back of a 6ft 5 man’s head for an hour and a half, and that’s if you’re lucky. Although, if you’re not located in such a bustling metropolis you might be OK, which brings me on to...

The local parade

Habitually these start about 3pm and end about 3.25pm, although this can be stretched to 4pm if you include the Pied Piper-esque ritual of walking up the street after the floats have passed. Well I say floats, I mean tractors and lorries with people in wigs on the back and kids holding banners while dancing/doing karate/martial dance.

Have a roster of Irish songs ready to belt out at a moment’s notice

If you’re exhausted after the parades and fancy a refreshment in one of Ireland’s myriad public houses, you may a) have to wait a while and b) be called upon to sing a verse or two of The Irish Rover. And possibly some others, because once a crowd gets into the singing groove they won’t stop just because the Irish songs have, as I learned when dozens of revelers outside The Quays in Galway started singing Eternal Flame.

Pace yourself

Once you’ve served your time at the bar (approximately 4 months on St Patrick’s Day), the intoxicating mix of a day off, effusive atmosphere and beer can all get a bit much. That mixed with the fact St Patrick’s Day is one where you can break Lent means things can get a bit messy. Disappear for half the night messy. Wake up the following morning feeling like Adagio for Strings was written just for you messy.

Try and avoid The Daily Mail the day after

Head rattling is bad enough, but hand wringing won’t do your fragile self any good. It’s pretty common for everyone’s favourite makeshift doormat to write a “Think of the children!” diatribe the day after St Patrick’s Day, shoving genteel Ireland’s face in debauchery they apparently hate but must show. A few pages after that, they may also have an affectionate piece on that loveable old troublemaking roister doister Oliver Reed.

March is not a great month for Irish sightseeing

If you’re away from home on Patrick’s Day and resolved to do some sightseeing round the general area, bear in mind the weather may not sit well with your plans. So if you were spending Paddy’s Day in, say, Cork, going to the Cliffs of Moher on the way home may result in being soaked to the skin and blown around the adjoining fields without mercy in near-hurricane weather, before being flung down the steps on the way down at great speed by a gust of Beaufort-busting wind. Not that I’m speaking from experience. Ahem.

A good oul film to end it all

If you decide not to go down the drink yourself into a Daily Mail-outraging stupor on St Patrick’s Day, you can always go home, perhaps with a takeaway, and watch a good oul Bank Holiday film, often with an Oirish twist (Sean Connery as an Irishman in Darby O’Gill anyone?) but sometimes without (Tropic Thunder, as RTE showed last year, crosses all ethnic barriers. Except maybe Vietnamese ones). Sure what else would you be doing?

University qualifications - what do they really mean? Confidence goes a long way

Recently I started a new job in Belfast, namely as a question writer for a TV quiz show. As you might expect it’s a conversation-starting occupation, as proved to be the case when talking to a taxi man a few days ago. When I jokingly asked him if he’d ever take part in a quiz on telly and maybe win a bit of money, he said back without much consideration: “Ah sure I’d be no good on things like that, I don’t have any qualifications or that."

It’s an attitude that is sadly pervasive. Be it through a lack of opportunity, a lack of application at the time, a lack of self-esteem or a combination of both, there are a distressing number of people who link intelligence to knowing capital cities or remembering what an ox bow lake is. Worse yet, they underplay the talents they actually do have and won’t be convinced they’re anything but a social misfit. Never mind the fact that maintaining one’s calm while navigating round a city center at rush hour is a pretty invaluable skill, that taxi driver thought of himself as stupid.
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I’ve seen this all my life in Donegal. People of an older generation were spat out of schools where being given a clout across the head featured heavily on the syllabus, where the focus was getting a job, inevitably in a factory or some such, getting some money into the family home, and that was about it. Bettering yourself was not an option, and if it was it was often actively discouraged through ridicule and a significant dearth of opportunities in the first place. Sometimes it’s so severe that even when opportunities do appear they aren’t taken up: Donegal sometimes feels replete with men of a certain age who turned down offers to play football abroad because they didn’t have the confidence to make it stick. That bad educational experience has in a lot of cases transmitted to their children’s generation, and low self-esteem dogs them for the rest of their lives. 

If the value of education can or should be defined at all, it should be to widen people’s base of knowledge and to pursue the fields people enjoy without obstacle of any kind. More than that, it should widen the base of things we deem worthy of study and pursuit. Up and down the country there are people young and old with talent, talent submerged and undermined and eroded. Helping those people is the smartest thing we could possibly do.

My favourite story of 2011 - Ontario nursing home and an Ireland-mad Canadian girl

Tara Muzumdar and Edra Ferguson

2011, by any standards, has been an incredibly busy year. The first two months alone, where the government fell in the most chaotic manner possible before exploding at the ballot box on impact, felt like an aeon all of itself. But in spite of this, and the great state of geopolitical flux that has unfolded before our eyes this year, my favourite story of 2011 doesn’t involve revolution or summits. It involves an Ontario nursing home, and an Ireland-mad Canadian girl.

Edra Ferguson was 103 and living in Belmont House in Toronto when a member of staff who regularly spent time with her, Tara Muzumdar, started looking through some of her books. What she discovered came as some surprise. Edra, unknown to seemingly everyone, was one of the first women in Canada to go to law school, the first female judge in Ontario, the first woman elected to city council in her hometown, and also ran for Mayor. And she did all this in the 1920s and 30s.

Tara, a frequent and fervent visitor to Ireland, was struck by the pioneering achievements of the woman in her charge, and resolved to do something. So she nominated Edra for the Order of Canada and, in the word of Edra’s son, orchestrated a media interest that went first national, then global.

After a life of firsts that had over the years got buried, a couple of days before her 104th birthday, Edra then added another illustrious honor to the list: becoming the oldest ever recipient of the Order.

It’s been a news year with a disproportionate amount of challenge, tragedy and woe. And that’s why this marvelous story about the kindness and initiative of Tara, and the incredible woman she stood up for is my favorite of the year.
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Twenty-six-years-old and the living is easy - reflecting on being a year older

Reflecting on a a birthday

I've been a bit distracted this week, and not just by the Dublin Divas. Not only did I turn 26 this week, but I'm also doing a review with the youth group I work with, and recorded videos for the 10th anniversary of Dáil na nÓg, an event I've attended twice, the first time in, gulp, 2002. And, with Michael D Higgins being inaugurated today, I've been reminiscing about the last time a President was elected.

I actually remember it quite vividly, because it was the same date as my 12th birthday party. And that night, after my party (three hours of indoor football, followed by cake eating) I went to Eason’s in Derry to buy a book I’d long coveted with my card money (some things, it seems, never change) and took to reading it while watching Mary McAleese’s acceptance speech. It certainly doesn’t feel like 14 years ago.

Now, as I stare into turning 26 and it stares back into me, birthdays aren’t so much a pretext for putting scoops of ice cream in a large glass of coke and pretending to be your favorite goalkeeper so much as it becomes an inventory on how your life is going. I’m not sure how I rate.

On one hand, I’ve had the chance to do things 12 year old me would not have imagined possible, and it’s only really when you take a step back do you realise how far you’ve come. On the other hand, most of the world’s top sports stars, actors and popstars I see about the place are now younger than me. A lot of said stars can dive into their pits of money like Scrooge McDuck, boast of winning myriad world championships and step out with jaw-droppingly good looking other famous people. I have not much money and fewer awards to my name. I’m not stepping out with anyone, jaw-droppingly good looking or otherwise. I don’t even have a cat.

While I’d describe my outlook on life as generally sunny, I feel a lot of pressure. Sometimes I feel anxiety that I won’t get to where I want to be in life, other times I’m out and out terrified about it. A lot of the pressure is internal, as I’ve always had a very clear idea of what I’ve wanted to do in life (something for which I actually feel quite lucky). Some of it is immediately external, in that family and friends and colleagues have always seemed to have very definite ideas as to where I’d end up. My biggest fear is that, for whatever reason, I don’t fulfil that prophecy. But some of that pressure is also cultural.

In ways the problem of pressure to be successful at a young age is not dissimilar to that of body image. Sports and pop stars are given enormous credence in popular culture, arenas of achievement where being over 35 gives you the status of a veteran, or even a retiree. We have popular music talent shows where teary fortysomethings claim “this is their last chance”. We have TV modelling shows where girls in their late twenties, even if they’re Christy Turlington facsimiles, aren’t even considered. With such a message surreptitiously being delivered at every turnabout, small wonder I often see the podium after a grand prix and think “Christ, I am wasting my life”.

But when I have such moments of (increasingly frequent) raw panic, I always try and step back. I may not be worth much, but I’d hope I’ve done things of value, particularly for other people. The setbacks, near-misses and frustrations of my own career seem rather small when you consider the throngs of potentially talented people who’ll never even have a chance of getting in the game. I also take comfort in the fact that in the history of everyone who has ever been successful there was a time when they weren’t, and that not everyone’s time comes right away. The actor Jon Hamm worked as a waiter and a designer on a porn set when most of his contemporaries were getting cast in Dawson’s Creek and Party Of Five, but becoming Don Draper is probably worth the long apprenticeship. Dancing judge Len Goodman is a massive transatlantic star but he was hardly in front of a camera until his late fifties. And how many films have you ever seen featuring a 30 year-old Morgan Freeman?

It's good to reflect now and then, but too much of it stops you from doing anything new. And as long as you can do something you enjoy, and that others can enjoy too, then everything else is just scale.