Patrick and the Oirish

8/9/2019 Patrick and the Oirish

1/7

17 th March, 2005

Patrick and the Oirishby Pdraig Belton

March is the cruellest month for an Irish emigrant. It breeds plastic

leprechauns out of dead supermarket aisles, mixes green food colouring withcheap American beer, and stirs dull headlines out of news desk writers.

Come the third week of March, and the Detroit Free Press again advertises the"Shamrocks and Shenanigans 5K", promising the spectacle of athletes decked"as their favorite Irish beer containers or leprechauns." The Miami Herald, undera headline of "Where to be wearin' o' the green," advertises all the localestablishments purveying a beer of colour and alcoholic quality you couldn'torder back home at McDaid's. The Kansas City Star challenges readersopening section E to test their 'mcknowledge with this green o'quiz.' SouthCarolina's The State, temporarily mistaking South Carolina for Bosnia, grills'the chief leprechaun in the governor's press office, with a few tough questionsabout why an Englishman like Sanford would go out of his way to offer thisspecial tribute [namely, a routine proclamation] to the Irish.' The solvent ofgreen beer apparently confers a temporary reprieve to colour even terroristscute and clownish, as when the Chicago Sun-Times, beneath a headline of'Begorrah!,' reports Northern Ireland's Gerry Adams dined with a proud Chicagoalderman and judge; Adams, fawns the reporter, had given up desert for Lent.

It is Saint Patrick's Day, that remarkable assault on taste as well as Irishnational sensibility perpetrated annually in the United States with green toiletpaper and greeting cards emblazoned with a dubious stereotype of a drunkenleprechaun, depicted more often than not in the act of baring his buttocks.Most Irish people who encounter the phenomenon are bemused and stunned.Forty years ago, an Irish consular official in Boston cabled to the Departmentof Foreign Affairs that in a weekend his office's entire work was being undonebefore his very eyes by 'shamrocks, green ties, caubeens, leprechauns and

clay pipes.' Two years later, another Irish envoy cabled Iveagh Houseastonished that West End Stage Irish stand-bys from an earlier century were


2/7


3/7

an Irish one in 1707; its wearing on the lapel in connection with St Patrick'sDay dates to 1681; and it was adopted by Protestants and Catholics alike ofthe Volunteers at the time of Grattan's Parliament in 1782, and by the equallynonsectarian United Irishmen in 1798. The Irish Guards, formed in 1900 byQueen Victoria to commemorate Irish participation in the Boer War and knowngenerally as "the Micks", receive shamrock every 17th March from a memberof the Royal Family. They originally drew Princess Alexandra in 1901, and untilrecently were festooned at the hands of HM the Queen Mum. As far as greenbeer, it was until 1960 impossible to find alcohol on St Patrick's Day, unlessyou were willing to brave exposure to moving trains or the dogs at the IrishKennel Club-and Guinness, you'll note, is black.

So stripped of mitre, green cloak, and decorative garden snake, what ancient

Patrick shivers underneath? There are two extant writings of the man, theConfessions and Letter to Coroticus, from which we know the sum total of whatwe know about him. These were embellished a great deal in subsequentcenturies; in 807 or 808, Ferdomnach, scribe of Armagh, incorporates into theBook of Armagh a fanciful Acts by one Muirchu Maccu Machteni, as well asthe oldest extant copy of the Confessions; this Muirchu, like anotherhagiographer named Treachn, likely wrote in the mid-seventh century.Modern Patrick studies probably begin with Irish-born Cambridge historian JohnBury and his 1905 Life, who treats Patrick and his still murkier predecessorPalladius as islands in the darkness of fifth century British Christianity, and

starts from the context of what is known about the late Roman empire in theBritish Isles. In 1942, Thomas O'Rahilly gave a lecture entitled "The TwoPatricks" to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which demonstrated theworks of Muirchu and Treachn to be fanciful products of the mediaevalimagination.

The Patrick of the Confessions and Letter's is a humble voice, sensitive andprone to injury at the hands of his critics, ashamed of his disrupted education,capable at the end of his life of pained defence against his detractors as wellas humble thanksgiving to his God. Like that other author of a Confessions, hisyouth bears some painfully remembered sin; yet his exegete E.A. Thompsoncautions appropriately "impurity - let us call it 'sex' - is almost (though notquite) as remote as humour from the word, and thoughts, of St Patrick." Therehas been a minority tradition inclined to view him as a proto-Joyce, and of allother modern Irish literature, too; both born at the periphery of a disintegratingempire, living in exile, inconfident, caught between worlds, and having recourseto stratagems, irony, and wit. Though amusing, this looking to Patrick for thewellsprings of all subsequent Celtic literature is misguided. He is simple,

pious, comparatively unlettered, and as far as imaginable from the man whowould create Kinch the jejune Jesuit and write a book with so many enigmas


4/7

and puzzles to keep the professors busy for centuries. One wonders, still, howthey would have gotten on.

After his death Patrick went into politics. His development in this direction,along with his cult, were first spurred by bishops of Armagh seeking toestablish their primacy over the whole of Ireland, and who conveniently castPatrick as the first Bishop of Armagh. The Vatican would also support the cultof Patrick, as the claim of his episcopal consecration in Gaul bolstered papalclaims to jurisdiction over the comparatively autonomous Celtic church. Later,Irish Protestants would themselves point to the lack of mention of the papacyin Patrick's writings to make the claim that he was not only the first IrishChristian, but also the first Irish Protestant (leading in the end to a number ofsurreal murals on My Lady's Road, Belfast; though lacking the level of high wit

enshrined in the intramural exchange 'No Pope here' / 'Lucky Pope'). In thecourtly Georgian Dublin of the eighteenth century, St Patrick provided a symbolto the Anglo-Irish ascendancy as they evolved a rather independent mindednationalism; the Crown responded by doing its best to co-opt the holiday andthem, with annual dinners in Dublin Castle and George III's modification of theHonours system to introduce the Knights of the Most Illustrious Order of StPatrick. Having been passed around by all other political comers, Patrickwould then in the second half of the nineteenth century become more familiarlya symbol for Catholic nationalism in its Home Rule and Fenian incarnations.Nowadays, his symbolic legitimacy is still contested between Republicans and

Loyalists in Belfast (who being parading sorts anyhow, each have their own StPatrick's parades), and in New York by gay rights groups and the AncientOrder of Hibernians (giving birth in 1991 to the memorable phrase "two, four,six, eight, how do you know Saint Patrick's straight?"). Then, of course, thereis the politics of support for Noraid, never very distant from the Americanparades. If stage Irish conceptions of green beer and sentimental recollectionsof discrimination represent two members of an Irish American trinity, the thirdis doubtless support for "the boys." In 1983, Irish Northern Aid Committeeleader Michael Flannery was elected grand marshal of the New York parade; in1985, active Noraid supporter Peter King as grand marshal made the entire

parade about the IRA, from his opening speech to the end. The website of theConnecticut Ancient Order of Hibernians manages to link both to Noraid and tothe Republican News, an IRA mouthpiece, making them under most normallyapplied standards apologists for terrorism, or something very close to it.

As far as Saint Patrick's Day goes, the festival of Patrick's 'falling asleep' datesat least to the ninth century, and receives mention in the Book of Armagh. It isfirst listed in Irish legal calendar in 1607, and added to the Church calendar by

Pope Urban VIII in 1631. The first religious parades held (and originally by IrishProtestants serving the King) to commemorate the feast day were in the United


5/7

States, in Boston dating to 1737 and in New York to 1762. The dying of theChicago river green (a feat done with vegetable food colouring) has incidentalorigins - it dates to 1962, when city crews had been tracing the sources ofpollution flows with coloured dyes. A plumber's overalls were accidentally dyedgreen earlier in the year, which gave the idea to labour leader Stephen Bailey,who in turn passed it to Mayor Daley pre. Dublin would import the parade fromthe United States only in 1996, with a strict government charge to "project,internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional andsophisticated country with wide appeal." That is, since none of the otherparades were doing it.

Which of course brings us back to green beer, and how the stage Irishmancame to dominate American celebrations of St Patrick's Day. In his working

life, the stage Irishman began as a humble slur, rose to the level of subversive,was promoted to clich, and then was put out to work in his old age as amarketer. Darby O'Gill and his Little People now sell cheerios. While the Oirishcharacter's impressive pedigree derives from the Globe - see, for instance,Macmorris in Henry V and Captain Whit in Johnson's Bartholomew Fair-ourcurrent popular American images of Irishness derive in large part fromVaudeville. Emerging in the 1880s from earlier minstrel and variety shows,Vaudeville provided an urban form of mass entertainment to decipher themysteries of immigration and industrialisation, and offer ways in its purview tofashion and control urban reality. The Library of Congress's collection on the

American Variety Stage includes a 1903 opening film by the AmericanMutoscope and Biograph Company, with the promising title A Wake in Hell'sKitchen. Set in an urban tenement, the plot opens when a dead man revives tosip a mourner's beer at his own wake, providing an excuse for the mourners tobegin punching one another. A Wake in Hell's Kitchen just might be one of theearliest surviving instances in the United States of that bellicose leprechaunwhich, together with the Stage Irish pidgin, continues to inform what passes forIrish-American culture, and its chosen greeting cards, football teams, andforms of communal celebration. A slightly better-remembered example mightbe John Wayne's The Quiet Man (1952), which featured a full complement of

priests, alcohol, brawling, and a script admirably composed wholly of suchprose constructions as "It's a bold sinful man you are, Sean Thornton. And whotaught you to be playing patty fingers in the holy water?"

Yet there were some real Irish in the mix in Vaudeville. However, ratherembarrassingly, they were more often than not wearing blackface. Irish andblack performers nonetheless managed to influence each other, even ifindirectly, with "Buck-and-wing" dancing emerging among Irish dancers and

rhythm tap among black performers. One was Master Juba, who learned thedances of free blacks and Irish in the Five Points area of the Lower East Side


6/7

(today buried underneath Columbus Park in Chinatown), then performed thesyncretic style of dance in London in 1848; finding Europe to be moreaccepting of his colour, he never returned. And there are some real Irish in themix today. It was with the departure of Lady Gregory and Synge's generationfrom the Abbey Theatre that dramatists such as Brendan Behan found in thetradition a resource to be ironised and used as an instrument of subversion. "Iregard being stage-Irish as something of a trade like any other," he said, "It'ssomething we Irish are particularly good at. After all, we have no other naturalresource that I know of." Behan found in the stage-Irish persona of an IRA mana stick with which to tickle the nose of stifling post-independence Fianna Filbrand nationalism, though there were many who missed the joke.

This is where I owe a personal, and perhaps also a racial, confession. There's

no doubting the dodgy past of our cousin the greeting-card leprechaun, or theentanglement with past imperial projects of the stage Oirish stereotypes offecklessness, inebriated charm and unreality. But the problem with all I'vewritten above is that we Irish actually rather like seeing ourselves as fecklessand charming, with an anti-pragmatic streak and a literature of improbability,nurtured no doubt by the lush imaginative inheritance of the Catholic faith,where you get a miracle every week. We may decry as Paddywhackery thenotion of the Irish as a transcendent, illogical people who shatter off regularlyinto the way of the fairies, but we at the same time rather suspect there issome truth in it. We may even shatter off ourselves on a regular basis. Our

literature is one in the conditional and the subjunctive, where the world-scrimdividing us from the fairies and the noumenal is always at most a thin one, andone that can be rolled back at that. Our conversation is one of tall storieswhich need not all necessarily be true, a spoken literature. The Quiet Man, yousee, has been adopted and is at this very moment being dubbed into Irish withthe backing of TG4, Foras na Gaeilge and dars na Gaeltachta. It may be thecase, as Declan Kiberd observes in the 17th century Irish language court poetSeathrn Citinn, that the last of the U Neill saw themselves as carrying onwith stiff upper-lips, and the English as querulously emotional, hotheaded, andunpredictable. But we grew into our colonial garments, and old clothes fit.

I will sidestep the temptation to reconcile this contradiction, as in Ireland beforeall other places paradox and relative truths are useful things to keep sweepingnarrative at bay. I will only take my summative text from the closing passagesof Portrait of the Artist and note that with adequate cunning, in exile, one cansilence the more discordant notes of stage Irishism and take pleasure in theremaining consonance of a generous country celebrating Irish culture. Ahumble, pre-modern British immigrant would approve. Beannachtai na File

Pdraig Naofa oraibh.


7/7

Pdraig Belton lives and writes in Oxford, and is head of a foreign policy thinktank. He writes daily on www.oxblog.com.

(Note: quotes in the second paragraph are taken from newspaper coverage ofSt Patrick's Day in 2004)

Documents

Patrick and the Oirish