Fighting talk allows sober realisation

On St Patrick’s Day many people in the United States assert that there are really only two kinds of people — “the Irish and those who wish they were (Irish)”.

When people talk about the Irish on this day, all too many speak about us in terms synonymous with fighting and drinking, which goes back to the days when Irish gangs roamed and terrorised American cities more than a century and a half ago.

The Irish still have the reputation of being heavy drinkers. We are the heaviest stout consumers in the world consuming over 20% of the total value of the world's stout market.

Irish people are second only to the Czech's in annual per capita beer consumption, even though our prices rank among the highest in the world.

Thus, we should be mindful of the way in which we celebrate, so that we do not bolster those negative

images of the fighting, drunken Irish with which we were so long synonymous.

Those fractious and inebriated images really belong to a bygone era a highly depressed period in which our people were not only economically backward, but also grossly exploited and largely uneducated. There is now, therefore, much of which to be justifiably proud.

Now, when Americans talk about "the fighting Irish", this usually has an educational dimension, for it is the soubriquet of the University of Notre Dame, which has the most famous and arguably the most popular college football team in the United States.

St Patrick's Day has long been more important to Irish emigrants and their descendants. As a result, most of our Government ministers are abroad today. It affords them a tremendous opportunity to promote this county and what we have to offer to the world.

Americans are acutely conscious of St Patrick's Day. Their president, George W Bush, represents all of the American people, but he comes from a party that never showed much concern for the Irish or their problems, and there should be no grounds for any suspicion that he is exploiting either the religious or ethnic significance of this day for political purposes.

It is disconcerting that he chose St Patrick's Day for the expiration of his ultimatum to Iraq.

Mr Bush has already made the appalling mistake of speaking in terms of waging a "crusade". This betrayed an extraordinary insensitivity to the historical implications of previous "crusades" in that part of the world.

It would be a tragedy if St Patrick's Day should be desecrated forever by the start of a conflict pitting Judeo-Christian society against the Muslim world.

When people talk about fundamentalism, they should not make the mistake of thinking that it is confined to the Jewish, Muslim or Far Eastern religions, because it is to be found in Christianity too even on this island, as we know to our cost.

Such fundamentalism is just as prevalent in the United States, especially in the southern states, where Mr Bush has his power base.

Over the years, the southern Christian fundamentalists frequently talked about "killing for Christ", which makes no more sense than fighting for peace, or fornicating for virginity.