THE LAST STRAW: Next Friday sees the start of a truly historic St Patrick's Day Festival, an event being held in March for the first time this millennium. Foot-and-mouth caused the 2001 festival to be postponed until summer, an idea veterans of the last millennium hoped would catch on. But the celebration has reverted to the traditional date out of respect for the early Christians, who believed that the mid-March weather and the moral threat posed by majorettes from America would cancel each other out.
Whatever the temperature, the weekend should get off to a blazing start on Friday night with the "AIB Glimmering", an exciting spectacle given added interest by the massive trading losses at the sponsor's US subsidiary, Allfirst.
According to the festival programme, the "Glimmering" will involve thousands of drummers and performers parading through the Dublin night to the River Liffey. There, "a mass of fireboats" will await. And as the event reaches its climax, with drums rolling, a torch-bearing AIB representative will step forward and ceremonially set fire to John Rusnak.
OK, I made that last bit up. In fact, the bank will only be setting fire to the boats (using €500 notes). But even so it should be a good night. Certainly, it doesn't detract from the entertainment that this event is part of a collaboration between AIB and schools which is called - wait for it - "Brighter Futures". Students of risky trading may point out that it was options rather than futures that landed Rusnak in trouble; but on the sort of margins humour columnists operate, I can't afford to worry about these distinctions.
The "Glimmering" is only one of many events in the festival, which also of course includes the St Patrick's Day parade. This year's theme is "Dream" and, representing dreams of success at the World Cup, the Grand Marshal will be Mick McCarthy. The Irish soccer team manager is a popular choice, although as a player his uncompromising style was perhaps more in keeping with the old, defensive Ireland than the new, self-confident one. Indeed, as he passes the reviewing stand, he may feel the urge to kick a ball into it; but we can only hope for the best.
The really exciting thing about this year's festival is that it will showcase the new, cleaner, greener Ireland. This may be premature, and yet the past week has certainly been a triumph for environmentalism. First there was the publication of the preliminary "All-Ireland Anti-Litter League" table - part of a campaign which, the organisers hope, will harness the inter-county competitiveness of Gaelic games to the cause of cleanliness.
The idea is to mark a town or city suburb from each county on a scale of 100. And sure enough, the table has already thrown up some intriguing GAA-style rivalries, including a very dirty all-Connacht affair in which Mayo edged out Galway for 27th place. I was personally thrilled to see Monaghan, 5th overall, hand a 19-point drubbing to Cavan in a one-sided match which was unusually clean for this fixture (no thanks to Cavan). And predictably, towns representing Northern Ireland all performed well, no doubt because of the high incidence there of what urban cleansing experts call "Protestants".
The second environmental success of the week was of course the plastic bag tax. This has been well received by business people, as witnessed by the shopkeeper who told The Irish Times that when the Minister for the Environment came canvassing again she would "string him up in the garage". But I must say I have some misgivings about the bag measure.
Firstly, I believe it discriminates against parents of young children who, for reasons I won't go into in case readers are eating breakfast, often have to deal with waste which needs not only to be bagged, but double-bagged, and in extreme cases, triple-bagged and dumped at sea. When parents use up all the supermarket bags they've been hoarding in the run-in to the tax, they may well undergo a change of lifestyle, which is what environmentalists hope.
But I would worry that, instead, the tax will just drive the bag trade underground. The benign scenario is street-traders supplementing their existing income from fireworks and smuggled cigarettes. But I can foresee turf-wars between Dublin plastic bag dealers, and lurid profiles in the popular press about criminals with nicknames such as "Tesco Bag", "Scum-bag," and, inevitably, "Osama Bin-liner". I can also picture hitherto law-abiding people reduced to hanging around street corners at night waiting for the bag-man.
But hey, this is probably pessimistic. The more hopeful view is that the 2002 St Patrick's Day will mark a new era, when Ireland at least begins to project a clean image to visitors. Who, according to the festival organisers, can also look forward to "theatre, fireworks, mischief and fun". And that's only at the AIB.
