Displaced in Mullingar:Wanderers who don't make it home wind up on St Patrick's Day parades, writes Michael Harding

I was in New York for St Patrick's Day four years ago and spent the afternoon on the top of a building, at an exclusive office party overlooking the parade. In the lobby there was a jazz group doing cool things with Irish melodies. I strolled from room to room, where the desks had been covered with trays of finger food, and then out through glass doors onto a balcony. The long procession of pipe bands, in dark colours with swaying bums, swinging drumsticks, and feathery cockatoos fluttering in a vicious wind did not impress the lady beside me.

"Just look at them," she said with some contempt. "What's wrong with them?" I asked. "They're just a crowd of boring old farts," she said, and went off brusquely to freshen her wine glass.

I once spent a summer in the town of Springhill in northern Florida, where a poor Irish couple living in a trailer cherished two faded brown photographs of a church in Co Mayo, taken 60 years earlier. Every Tuesday they would dress up in garishly patterned trousers and shirts, eat burgers in the local senior citizens' club, and spend the afternoon playing bingo. They showed me photographs of their St Patrick's Day party, as the pair of them waltzed around a ballroom in green hats.

The world is full of wanderers, refugees, people displaced or stateless, in hiding or on the run. Everyone is in search of a new beginning. But like children, everyone wants to go home.

Those who don't make it home, who get stranded in the wrong town, camp or ghetto, sometimes end up like geese blown off course in a storm; parading up and down a foreign street, preening feathers, and making strange noises.

There must be hundreds of thousands of human beings flying through the air at any single moment. And there are only two directions. You're either leaving home or going home.

In Co Leitrim, I've seen long grass swallow tyres, children's toys, giant coal carts, and even a Volkswagen Polo. There's something in the earth which enfolds us, and holds us, and sucks us in. Nobody can ever forget the place they were born. Everybody is haunted by the name of some far-off townland, or the song of some particular river. Being born makes a difference.

Years ago I was parked beside a lake, in an old Renault 16, when a gawky boy approached, and stuck his nose in the passenger window, and said in a strong country accent: "Be jeepers, she's sittin' very low on the ground. She must have a spring gawn in the back." His parents were German, but there was no doubt that Co Leitrim would never let him go.

Every week I travel in my beautiful Pajero to Cavan, the town where I was born. I have chips in the Roma Cafe on Bridge Street, which is next door to the house where my granny once lived. She used to have a large amber-coloured glass sugar bowl, like an Ardagh Chalice on the centre of the table, and when I went to visit her sometimes, after school, she would cut a thick slice of bread, spread warm butter on it and then sprinkle it with sugar from the bowl.

The staff in the Roma Cafe were not born when Granny fed me sugar. But they make dough for the pizzas, and they have great fun with the customers. They are young men,from far-flung European villages and cities, who have come to make chips on Bridge Street.

Going to Cavan I track the blossoming of daffodils, and other flowers. I keep a watchful eye on chestnut trees, and hedgerows for signs of distending shoots. And I can trace a line of ancestors through the graveyards where old men lie, and churches where young girls once blushed with bridal innocence and joy.

Coming back to Mullingar, I pass through Castlepollard, where my grandmother was born. I pass a house where a grand-aunt saw a ghost one night, about 100 years ago.

My weekly trip to Cavan is a ritual, which mirrors the coming of swallows and the return of the salmon, because each week, I too return to the beginning.

I've never been a great fan of the St Patrick's Day parade. But I know that for many in Mullingar tomorrow will be a great day, of preening feathers and making strange noises, and marching on a street that for some is strange, and for others is home.