Paddy's Day

I was looking at the website for the St. Patrick's Day Festival in Dublin this morning. That thing just keeps getting bigger and bigger - this year, it's gone up to five days. Which is astonishing, given that it only started as a one-day event in 1996.

The history of Paddy's Day in Ireland is an interesting one, which I always used to enjoy telling visitors about when we lived in Dublin. All the stuff most people associate with the day - parades, leprechauns, getting blotto on green beer - are actually American inventions. While St. Patrick's Day has been a national holiday in Ireland for decades, it is still primarily a religious and family occasion there. The most traditional thing to do on Paddy's Day in Ireland is get up in the morning, put a bunch of shamrock in your lapel, and go to Mass. Afterwards, you'd go round to your family's for a big meal - and if you stopped in the pub for a pint or two en route, well and good, but there's no great tradition of getting wasted. In the afternoon, many of the larger county towns and cities have parades, but with the exception of Dublin in recent years, they are extremely modest affairs - absolutely nothing like you'd see in New York or Chicago.

The whole St. Patrick's Day Festival in Dublin - which is really pretty good - was started in the late 1990s by the government and tourist authorities. It was a response to both Ireland's growing prosperity (even fifteen years ago, there wouldn't have been the money to host such a thing), and the demands of visitors. The Irish Tourist Board was acutely aware of the fact that each March, hordes of (mostly North American) tourists were pouring into Dublin expecting the mother of all Paddy's Day celebrations, and going away very disappointed.

Even now, the Dublin parade - while very entertaining and enjoyable - isn't terribly Irish. I went to the parade three times, and each time nearly three-quarters of the participants came from outside Ireland - which is indicative of the diaspora, I suppose. People there are always amazed by how excited foreigners get about their national holiday.