Séamas O'Reilly: Now that I’ve lived in England so long, I enjoy St Patrick’s Day more than ever

Since I like being Irish, I now regard St Patrick's Day as a welcome vehicle for my long-held feelings of Hibernian Supremacy, and a handy excuse to push Irish culture on to unsuspecting, but usually grateful, friends here and online

'I watched, bemused, as news footage showed Chicago dying their river green, or the Empire State Building or Sydney Opera House illuminated for the occasion.'

It’s hard to really articulate what St Patrick’s Day is for. It is, at root, a religious holiday obviously, but characterising it in this way today would be stretching things beyond credulity.

Even the faith-denuded extravaganza of modern day Christmas, for all its commercialism and excess, has deep religious practice at its core. Christmas also celebrates, at least on paper, the birth of someone whom 2.2bn Christians consider the most important man to have ever lived, a momentous event in world history, whatever your belief. St Patrick’s Day, by contrast, commemorates the life of a Welshman who made a country that was already Christianising a little more Christian, and stole from the Ice Age full credit for our lack of snakes.