It’s high time Ireland’s politicians lived up to their promises and brought an
end to the hideous and demeaning farce of St Patrick's Day.
It has become an occasion of national humiliation for years now.
It should
really be called St Patrick's DNA, as across the world, Irishmen and women
have shown in full and shameful manner how we cannot be trusted to celebrate
the day without making drunken disgraces of ourselves.
To measure one's national pride by advancing the cause of cirrhosis is truly
bizarre: Liver Dance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, with governments endorsing the Drunken Paddy
stereotype across the world, the plain people of Ireland dutifully conform
to expectations, both at home and abroad.
But we have already informally established the caricature elsewhere, with the
transformation of First Holy Communion into an excuse for girls to be draped
with huge Joan Collins wigs, fake tan and make-up.
And the Catholic Church, |as broken as a Mormon lap-dancing club in
Afghanistan, is speechless at this degradation of the consecration of bread
and wine into the living body and blood of Jesus Christ, the redeemer of
mankind.
And no, I'm not saying that — it's what the Catholic Church actually believes.
Yet it nonetheless allows the parents of a seven-year old girl to dress her
up like a trollop in order to celebrate this momentous day and then to spend
the aftermath getting paralytic.
Men once gave their lives to keep the faith
alive: now it's an excuse for alcoholic comas.
It doesn't stop there.
The
survival of Irish traditional dance is one of the cultural triumphs of this
country: but it has now been turned into a burlesque caricature as little
girls are attired like tarts, with bogus ringlets, eyeliner and false
eyelashes, and yet more tan.
And they are then adorned in phony dresses apparently torn from the Book of
Kells; the result looks like some grisly Hibernian minstrel show.
Dance is
dance, it doesn't need bogus costumes, hair extensions or make-up to make it
authentic.
St Patrick's Day has thus become the one-day distillation of a ghastly
year-long caricature.
If the BBC were to offer comparable stereotypes of
such paddy-whackery, we would be howling about the racist portrayals of the
Irish.
Indeed, when the mayor of New York made some perfectly accurate observations
about Irish behaviour there on St Patrick's Day, the Irish Voice newspaper
predictably shrieked: ‘Mayor Bloomberg outrages Irish Americans with “people
that are totally inebriated hanging out windows” comments.’
I'm sure lots of people were outraged, indignation/anger/offendedness being
the default mode of the Irish.
The point is: was Bloomberg right?
If he was,
what's the problem?
Do Italians or Swedes or Spanish hang drunkenly out of
windows on their national days?
So, we all know the caricature is
essentially correct.
Our per-capita alcoholic consumption is exceeded by
only a couple of central European states with names like Boldova that have
officially been declared lunatic asylums by the UN and placed in armed
quarantine.
But what makes our figures worse is that we have a huge
population that doesn't drink at all, so that those who do drink really do
drink.
Yet far from being ashamed at this achievement, it forms the heart of a really
perverse national characteristic.
We like to boast how much alcohol we
consume — but if outsiders then agree with us, they're indulging in
anti-Irish racism, and the cry goes up, ‘Call the speech police immediately.
Our feelings are being hurt.’
Governments can't do much about the social culture of the people they rule.
After all, Russian ways survived 80 years of totalitarian communism.
But they could start by cancelling all state-sponsored booze-ups on St
Patrick's Day, with all this year's receptions cancelled — not least because
they'll actually be paid for by our grandchildren.
Pubs and off-licences
should only be allowed to open an hour after St Patrick's parades are over.
Street drinking must be rewarded with booze being poured over the offender's
head.
And public urination should be punished by making offenders — both
male and female — pass water into specially -made 220-volt floor-sockets at
the local police station.
We’ve had plenty of law.
Perhaps it’s time for some order.