th

17 March, 2005

Patrick and the Oirish

by Pádraig Belton
March is the cruellest month for an Irish emigrant. It breeds plastic
leprechauns out of dead supermarket aisles, mixes green food colouring with
cheap 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, under
a headline of "Where to be wearin' o' the green," advertises all the local
establishments purveying a beer of colour and alcoholic quality you couldn't
order back home at McDaid's. The Kansas City Star challenges readers
opening section E to test their 'mcknowledge with this green o'quiz.' South
Carolina's The State, temporarily mistaking South Carolina for Bosnia, grills
'the chief leprechaun in the governor's press office, with a few tough questions
about why an Englishman like Sanford would go out of his way to offer this
special tribute [namely, a routine proclamation] to the Irish.' The solvent of
green beer apparently confers a temporary reprieve to colour even terrorists
cute and clownish, as when the Chicago Sun-Times, beneath a headline of
'Begorrah!,' reports Northern Ireland's Gerry Adams dined with a proud Chicago
alderman 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 Irish

national sensibility perpetrated annually in the United States with green toilet
paper and greeting cards emblazoned with a dubious stereotype of a drunken
leprechaun, 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 Department
of Foreign Affairs that in a weekend his office's entire work was being undone
before his very eyes by 'shamrocks, green ties, caubeens, leprechauns and
clay pipes.' Two years later, another Irish envoy cabled Iveagh House
astonished that West End Stage Irish stand-bys from an earlier century were
being revived before him on the streets of America: 'many Irish people would
find offensive the green top hats, the shillelaghs, the green carnations, green
beer, green whiskey and even green traffic lanes.'

It's not so much Irish as Oirish - that depiction of Paddy the tireless vaudeville
employee, setting down his green beer and praties only momentarily to brawl
with his shillelagh, or mutter semanticisms never heard in Ireland save from
Americans imagining they are communicating with the locals. While of late
New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have wisely rid themselves of parades
featuring all other ethnic stereotypes, come mid-March and drunken,
pugnacious leprechauns appear go leor on Broadway. Equally odd, to hear
most pubgoers of the nuclear superpower talk over their green Miller Genuine
Drafts, one could be forgiven for imagining that the peoples of England and
Ireland were still fervently at war, or that the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square
somehow still advertised that Irish need not apply. The story of how we got to
this amusing state of affairs wends through Latin-scented ecclesial disputes; to
Shakespeare, an Empire, and vaudeville; and a mysterious Britannic cleric
whose writings provide one of our few glimpse of Britain in the century after the
first Empire on which the sun never set extricated itself from its imperial
commitments west of the Channel.

To clear away a few misconceptions about Patrick: he was not a mitre-bearing,

green-clad figure, forcing the exile of a put-out garden snake from his Irish
home between bites of corned beef. Episcopal mitres date only to the twelfth
century; for green, try rather blue, the colour attached to saint and nation from
the early mediaeval period onward; for corned beef, instead think pig products:
perhaps boiled bacon joint, or a piece of boiled salted pork, followed by
cabbage and come morning a breakfast pudding based on reconstituted pigs'
blood. Ireland is not the Middle East. As far as snakes, the third-century
geographer and grammarian Solinus notes Hibernia has been distinctly lacking
in its snake complement since at least his time. Part of the reason for the
island's herpetological deprivation derives precisely from its hibernian climate;
though in 1876, a Phoenix Park employee named John Supple nonetheless
managed to die from a python bite in the Zoological gardens; his family must
have had a difficult time explaining that one.

We should also do away with leprechauns here too. As a self-respecting minor

pagan character, An Lobaircin, a decidedly uncheerful fairy cobbler, would have
had nothing whatsoever to do with a saint's day. He eventually merged,
somewhere in the sexually liberated West Village, with the stage Irishman of
whom we'll be speaking later. Seamróg or trifolium repens has at least got a
distinguished if royalist pedigree-it is mentioned in an English text in 1571 and
an Irish one in 1707; its wearing on the lapel in connection with St Patrick's
Day dates to 1681; and it was adopted by Protestants and Catholics alike of
the Volunteers at the time of Grattan's Parliament in 1782, and by the equally
nonsectarian United Irishmen in 1798. The Irish Guards, formed in 1900 by
Queen Victoria to commemorate Irish participation in the Boer War and known
generally as "the Micks", receive shamrock every 17th March from a member
of the Royal Family. They originally drew Princess Alexandra in 1901, and until
recently were festooned at the hands of HM the Queen Mum. As far as green
beer, it was until 1960 impossible to find alcohol on St Patrick's Day, unless
you were willing to brave exposure to moving trains or the dogs at the Irish
Kennel 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, the
Confessions and Letter to Coroticus, from which we know the sum total of what
we know about him. These were embellished a great deal in subsequent
centuries; in 807 or 808, Ferdomnach, scribe of Armagh, incorporates into the
Book of Armagh a fanciful Acts by one Muirchu Maccu Machteni, as well as
the oldest extant copy of the Confessions; this Muirchu, like another
hagiographer named Tíreachán, likely wrote in the mid-seventh century.
Modern Patrick studies probably begin with Irish-born Cambridge historian John
Bury and his 1905 Life, who treats Patrick and his still murkier predecessor
Palladius 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 the
British Isles. In 1942, Thomas O'Rahilly gave a lecture entitled "The Two
Patricks" to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which demonstrated the
works of Muirchu and Tíreachán to be fanciful products of the mediaeval
imagination.

The Patrick of the Confessions and Letter's is a humble voice, sensitive and
prone 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 well
as humble thanksgiving to his God. Like that other author of a Confessions, his
youth bears some painfully remembered sin; yet his exegete E.A. Thompson
cautions appropriately "impurity - let us call it 'sex' - is almost (though not
quite) as remote as humour from the word, and thoughts, of St Patrick." There
has been a minority tradition inclined to view him as a proto-Joyce, and of all
other modern Irish literature, too; both born at the periphery of a disintegrating
empire, living in exile, inconfident, caught between worlds, and having recourse
to stratagems, irony, and wit. Though amusing, this looking to Patrick for the
wellsprings of all subsequent Celtic literature is misguided. He is simple,
pious, comparatively unlettered, and as far as imaginable from the man who
would create Kinch the jejune Jesuit and write a book with so many enigmas
and puzzles to keep the professors busy for centuries. One wonders, still, how
they 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 to
establish their primacy over the whole of Ireland, and who conveniently cast
Patrick as the first Bishop of Armagh. The Vatican would also support the cult
of Patrick, as the claim of his episcopal consecration in Gaul bolstered papal
claims to jurisdiction over the comparatively autonomous Celtic church. Later,
Irish Protestants would themselves point to the lack of mention of the papacy
in Patrick's writings to make the claim that he was not only the first Irish
Christian, but also the first Irish Protestant (leading in the end to a number of
surreal 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 the
courtly Georgian Dublin of the eighteenth century, St Patrick provided a symbol
to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy as they evolved a rather independent minded
nationalism; the Crown responded by doing its best to co-opt the holiday and
them, with annual dinners in Dublin Castle and George III's modification of the
Honours system to introduce the Knights of the Most Illustrious Order of St
Patrick. Having been passed around by all other political comers, Patrick
would then in the second half of the nineteenth century become more familiarly
a 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 St
Patrick's parades), and in New York by gay rights groups and the Ancient
Order 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, there
is the politics of support for Noraid, never very distant from the American
parades. If stage Irish conceptions of green beer and sentimental recollections
of discrimination represent two members of an Irish American trinity, the third
is doubtless support for "the boys." In 1983, Irish Northern Aid Committee
leader Michael Flannery was elected grand marshal of the New York parade; in
1985, 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 the
Connecticut Ancient Order of Hibernians manages to link both to Noraid and to
the Republican News, an IRA mouthpiece, making them under most normally
applied 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' dates
at least to the ninth century, and receives mention in the Book of Armagh. It is
first 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 Irish
Protestants serving the King) to commemorate the feast day were in the United
States, in Boston dating to 1737 and in New York to 1762. The dying of the
Chicago river green (a feat done with vegetable food colouring) has incidental
origins - it dates to 1962, when city crews had been tracing the sources of
pollution flows with coloured dyes. A plumber's overalls were accidentally dyed
green earlier in the year, which gave the idea to labour leader Stephen Bailey,
who in turn passed it to Mayor Daley père. Dublin would import the parade from
the United States only in 1996, with a strict government charge to "project,
internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and
sophisticated country with wide appeal." That is, since none of the other
parades were doing it.

Which of course brings us back to green beer, and how the stage Irishman
came 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 cliché, and then was put out to work in his old age as a
marketer. Darby O'Gill and his Little People now sell cheerios. While the Oirish
character's impressive pedigree derives from the Globe - see, for instance,
Macmorris in Henry V and Captain Whit in Johnson's Bartholomew Fair-our
current popular American images of Irishness derive in large part from
Vaudeville. Emerging in the 1880s from earlier minstrel and variety shows,
Vaudeville provided an urban form of mass entertainment to decipher the
mysteries of immigration and industrialisation, and offer ways in its purview to
fashion and control urban reality. The Library of Congress's collection on the
American Variety Stage includes a 1903 opening film by the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company, with the promising title A Wake in Hell's
Kitchen. Set in an urban tenement, the plot opens when a dead man revives to
sip a mourner's beer at his own wake, providing an excuse for the mourners to
begin punching one another. A Wake in Hell's Kitchen just might be one of the
earliest surviving instances in the United States of that bellicose leprechaun
which, together with the Stage Irish pidgin, continues to inform what passes for
Irish-American culture, and its chosen greeting cards, football teams, and
forms of communal celebration. A slightly better-remembered example might
be John Wayne's The Quiet Man (1952), which featured a full complement of
priests, alcohol, brawling, and a script admirably composed wholly of such
prose constructions as "It's a bold sinful man you are, Sean Thornton. And who
taught you to be playing patty fingers in the holy water?"

Yet there were some real Irish in the mix in Vaudeville. However, rather
embarrassingly, they were more often than not wearing blackface. Irish and
black performers nonetheless managed to influence each other, even if
indirectly, with "Buck-and-wing" dancing emerging among Irish dancers and
rhythm tap among black performers. One was Master Juba, who learned the
dances of free blacks and Irish in the Five Points area of the Lower East Side
(today buried underneath Columbus Park in Chinatown), then performed the
syncretic style of dance in London in 1848; finding Europe to be more
accepting of his colour, he never returned. And there are some real Irish in the
mix today. It was with the departure of Lady Gregory and Synge's generation
from the Abbey Theatre that dramatists such as Brendan Behan found in the
tradition a resource to be ironised and used as an instrument of subversion. "I
regard being stage-Irish as something of a trade like any other," he said, "It's
something we Irish are particularly good at. After all, we have no other natural
resource that I know of." Behan found in the stage-Irish persona of an IRA man
a stick with which to tickle the nose of stifling post-independence Fianna Fáil
brand 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 the
entanglement with past imperial projects of the stage Oirish stereotypes of
fecklessness, inebriated charm and unreality. But the problem with all I've
written above is that we Irish actually rather like seeing ourselves as feckless
and 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 the
notion of the Irish as a transcendent, illogical people who shatter off regularly
into the way of the fairies, but we at the same time rather suspect there is
some 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-scrim
dividing us from the fairies and the noumenal is always at most a thin one, and
one that can be rolled back at that. Our conversation is one of tall stories
which need not all necessarily be true, a spoken literature. The Quiet Man, you
see, has been adopted and is at this very moment being dubbed into Irish with
the backing of TG4, Foras na Gaeilge and Údarás na Gaeltachta. It may be the
case, as Declan Kiberd observes in the 17th century Irish language court poet
Seathrún Céitinn, that the last of the Uí Neill saw themselves as carrying on
with stiff upper-lips, and the English as querulously emotional, hotheaded, and
unpredictable. But we grew into our colonial garments, and old clothes fit.

I will sidestep the temptation to reconcile this contradiction, as in Ireland before

all other places paradox and relative truths are useful things to keep sweeping
narrative at bay. I will only take my summative text from the closing passages
of Portrait of the Artist and note that with adequate cunning, in exile, one can
silence the more discordant notes of stage Irishism and take pleasure in the
remaining consonance of a generous country celebrating Irish culture. A
humble, pre-modern British immigrant would approve. Beannachtai na Féile
Pádraig Naofa oraibh.
Pádraig Belton lives and writes in Oxford, and is head of a foreign policy think
tank. He writes daily on www.oxblog.com.

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