St Patrick's Day

..not Patty.

A statue of St Patrick on the church in Feystown.

It’s that time of year when Americans begin to get excited and post content on social media, pictures of four-leafed clovers, cartoons featuring leprechauns, and their plans for “St Patty’s Day”. I sometimes wonder if they have a masochistic streak as inevitably in the comments they get ripped to shreds by Irish people. In Britain St Patrick’s Day has been commercialised by brewers who encourage people to drink themselves into a stupor while wearing green hats because apparently that’s how Irish people celebrate the day.

When I was a child the most exciting thing about St Patrick’s Day, apart from getting a day off school, was that you could break your Lenten fast for one day. The 17th of March always falls during Lent.

When I lived at home I didn’t know a single adult woman who took sugar in her tea as giving up sugar was one of the things you did when you became a teenager, a Lenten rite of passage. By the time Lent ended you had developed a taste for tea without sugar. For some reason this only happened to women; on Easter Sunday men once again reached for the sugar bowl.

Children were expected to give up sweets. When we were very young this was relatively easy to do as we didn’t get sweets very often. On Tuesdays Davy Johnson, who sold groceries from the back of a tiny van, called at our house. My mother would buy two or three packets of sweets, Love Hearts or wine gums. They came in tubes which she split in half and handed out to those of us old enough for sweets. The baby and toddlers, didn’t miss out though as they were given bottles of Farex amply laced with sugar. Occasionally if relatives visited on a Sunday they would bring bags of Raspberry Ruffles or boxes of Smarties. Uncle Vincent always brought us sweets. I remember him once walking into the kitchen carrying a box of Maltesers under his arm and holding by the ankles his small son Damain. We were shocked that Damian was hanging upside-down but pleased that Uncle Vincent hadn’t dropped the Maltesers in the yard.

On the morning of St Patrick’s Day we would be sent outside to find shamrocks to pin to our coats. Mammy had taught us the difference between clover and shamrock and we would come back with bunches of the correct greenery. There was always a drama as we tried to find enough pins to go round before leaving for Mass. On the way home from the chapel my mother would sometimes tell us who she had spotted at communion with a clump of clover pinned to their lapel.

“God love them, sure they tried their best.”

On St Patrick’s Day only Catholics wore shamrock and had a day off school. This seemed unfair as almost everyone got a day off for the 12th of July even though that was a Protestant celebration. Often factories and mills would close for a week around the twelfth so everyone had to take their holidays then. We accepted these cultural differences without question. I was quite old when I found out that middle-class Protestants often decamped to places south of the border during the twelfth. They found it just as problematic as we did. In February 2000 St Patrick’s Day was finally made a public holiday in Northern Ireland, and now all children get a day off.

Today St Patrick’s day is one of the most celebrated saint’s days in the world. Once, a few years ago, I spent St Patrick’s Day in Italy. On a wet miserable evening in Florence I kept bumping into gangs of young Americans going from bar to bar. They were all wearing leprechaun hats.

I was really pleased that Jessie Buckley won the Oscar last night and pleased too that she ended her speech in Irish. On that note to anyone who celebrates St Patrick’s Day, Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh.

I am distantly related to half the people buried in this graveyard.

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