The Irish have earned the right to celebrate

It is hard to think of another country that has so very successfully turned its national day, the celebration of its national saint’s birthday — one of them anyway — into such slick marketing and political opportunities.

All around the world tomorrow, on St Patty’s Day as some of our American cousins insist on calling it, the wearing o’ the green will be used as an excuse to celebrate Irishness, Irish culture, and Irish ancestry, no matter how diluted.

The shamrock will be drowned, but maybe with less destructive abandon than before. The shamrock and all that goes with it has already been delivered to the White House, sustaining an invaluable connection. Ambitions and relationships will be lubricated.

Communities at home and abroad will come together to celebrate Irishness though they will, first and foremost, celebrate fellowship, friendship and the kind of solidarity that once made the Irish abroad, especially in Britain and America, a force to be reckoned with.

That influence may have waned, Cricklewood in London and New York’s Breezy Point are no longer imagined as displaced Irish counties; Peak Paddy has passed. Or has it?

Though the From The Archives piece in today's paper describes a St Patrick’s Day in New York that will never be repeated, Paddy and Patricia’s glasses are very much half full today. That 1949 report recorded that 62 battalions, most with at least one band, marched up an avenue of skyscrapers... It is estimated that 1,750,000 persons saw the parade. Grand Marshal John A. Coleman glowed: “This is undoubtedly the biggest day we have ever had.” That was certainly Peak Paddy of a sort but a different, more rounded one seems to beckon.

Despite our difficulties, difficulties replicated in most western societies, we were never more comfortable, never more secure, never more tolerant, never more independent and as yesterday’s inspiring countrywide demonstrations on climate change showed, never more determined to build a better future by challenging the forces and habits threatening the success we have built since achieving independence and especially since joining the European Union.

We may not be any more ambitious than our grandparents but only the most dismal would deny we were never better placed to realise those ambitions. There are difficulties that cannot be denied — a housing crisis, a chaotic health system, denial on climate change and, as is the case in almost every country, a changing world of work making traditional life patterns unattainable for too many. Brexit’s unknown unknowns press too. We have an enduring democracy and a stable political system even if it can be deeply frustrating and deliver less than it might. The alternative, as the House of Commons shows almost every day, could be far, far worse.

Even if the great success of this small Republic is not as evenly spread as it must be, a re-reading of Seán O’Casey’s seminal plays, nearly all records of grinding poverty and injustice, shows how very far we have come. We must build on that so that all share in this once-unimaginable achievement — one that in time might become Peak Paddy II.