SAVING ST Patrick's Day from the capitalist clutches of the lobotomised iGeneration is a fraught challenge, but in rising to it, I have surprisingly embraced those very traditions I once so proudly abjured, writes Ultan Quigley.
I want to talk about St Patrick's Day. What's that noise? Is it the sound of a thousand readers groaning as they turn to that interview with the latest pharmaceutically befuddled pop singer? St Patrick's Day is just another bank holiday. Isn't it? The culchies and the rosary-twisters might think it worth celebrating, but, for the smug urban elitist, this most significant of feast days simply offers another opportunity to stew complacently in front of the television.
Well, excuse me. Excuse me! But if we allow St Patrick's Day - call it "Paddy's Day" near me and you had better prepare for a beating - to be eaten up by the same avaricious forces that consumed Christmas, then we may as well parcel up our souls right now and airmail them to the Coca Cola Company. We are in danger of losing something important.
I was reminded of this while assisting my daughter, Gealbhan, with her school project last week. By rights, it was my partner's turn to pitch in with the homework, but, following a misunderstanding concerning our female neighbour, a certain fuacht had fallen upon the household and I felt it politic to volunteer for extra duties. (Why was I staring in the direction of the young woman's house with field glasses? Because I had spied a rare Sandwich tern nesting in her guttering. Why else?) Thus, after enduring only an hour of Gealbhan's pleading and hammering on the study door, I magnanimously swilled back the remains of my whiskey, left my latest poem unfinished and accompanied the young girl to the living room.
Gealbhan had been asked to assemble information on St Patrick's Day into an easily digestible package. A noble task, you might think. Who among us does not have happy memories of leafing through dusty volumes in libraries and scribbling notes into ragged journals? Things are not as they use to be. Gealbhan's task, in so far as I could understand it, involved hammering phrases associated with St Patrick into her computer and copying the results onto something called Face Space. The "website" played merry traditional tunes when turned on and carried images of various parades in grim parts of the American midwest. This isn't education. It's lobotomy by proxy. It's an attempt to turn the easily led into compliant cyborgs.
I was so appalled by the experience that I felt compelled to calm my nerves with a few more fingers of uisce beatha. I recalled cultural clashes with my own parents. The appalled look on my father's face when he caught me listening to the immortal tunes of Leonard Cohen is burnt on my brain like an extravagantly curlicued brand.
"That's never music. That's just satanic mumbling," the old man bellowed.
Yet the gulf between my dad and me seems narrow when set beside the abyss that separates today's parents and the iGeneration. We may have had different tastes to our mammies and daddies, but Gealbhan and her friends actually occupy different universes to their guardians. It's the universe of PlayStations and Xboxes and iPods. It's also the universe of cyber-stalking, sexual grooming and internet pornography.
After calming my nerves with one more small drink, I grabbed Gealbhan by the wrists and dragged her out to the darkening garden. We set to gathering coarse grasses and assembling them in neat piles by the back door. While Seabhac, the cat, looked on with amusement, I told my daughter about the ancient Celtic tradition of Pat's bonnet and how the donning of such garments on the saint's feast day united all - from lairds down to serfs. As older readers will remember, the hats, fashioned from straw and hay, are worn during the neighbourly practice of the annual bonnet visit. I plastered the grass on my scalp and embarked on a demonstration of Pat's gambol, the dance that accompanied the ancient revels - left leg up, right arm bent in a jaunty crook. "Come bold spring and banjax me radishes," I crowed.
Ever the joker, Gealbhan, who was taking a breather on the kitchen step, leaned towards the cat and, after indicating her father with a nod, began rotating an index finger in the general area of her temple.
Crazy? Yes, maybe I am crazy. Maybe those of us who treasure some of the old ways do belong in a lunatic asylum.
Who now recalls Protestant's leg? This was the cheeky name given to a confection that was traditionally offered to children on the days before St Patrick's Day. A tube of liquorice, containing a squirt of raspberry jam flavoured with apple pips, Proddy's leg - chewy, luscious - somehow managed to infuse the entire body with the coming abundance of spring.
My friends and I, scruffy shorts topping muddied legs, would gnaw on the treasured sweetmeat as we watched the annual St Patrick's Day parade progress through our small town. It wasn't much. Eight female pipers would turn ever pinker as cloud-loads of sleet were vomited over their tatty uniforms. Three tractors, each bedecked with a moth-eaten tricolour, would do their best to avoid stalling during their short passage. "Simple" Frankie O'Neill would pull on green vestments, grab the cardboard crozier and, as best his limited abilities would allow, attempt to take on the persona of the Saint.
I confess that we laughed at the spectacle. In later years, when I moved to Dublin, my contemporaries and I were even more scornful of the somewhat larger - though no less charmingly pathetic - parade that progressed through the capital at the time. Then a member of the Communist League Association, I would join my comrades at Parnell Square each March 17th to wave placards calling for the secularisation of the State holiday. Priests out! People in! The association of national identity with organised religion appalled me then and appals me now. But, in a savage irony, both the reactionary and progressive forces were, ultimately, overpowered by the ruthless energies of a worldwide capitalist conspiracy.
Look at today's shiny St Patrick's Day "Festival". The pink legs and cardboard floats have gone, but, in their place we are offered the numbing spectacle of giant corporate totems promoting sweet drinks, flyovers by killer fighter jets and an invasion of unwelcome American anti-culture.
If I could go back in time and sit once more on that wall, I would wave my Proddy's leg in the air and cheer the parade loudly. Yes, the old St Patrick's Day festivities were a tad shoddy. Sure, they celebrated a corrupt religion. But they were bracingly Irish in a way the current event cannot boast.
I had brooded so long on these matters that night had fallen and Gealbhan had made her way back into the house. I pulled off the remains of my Pat's bonnet and sat on the step to weep. We are all lost.
Then I heard a happy noise. Glancing towards the living room window, I saw the shape of Gealbhan outlined against the curtains as she acted out a cheeringly familiar ritual. Her left leg was up. Her right arm was bent in a jaunty crook. She was doing Pat's gambol and it was bringing ecstatic joy to her mother and stepbrother. Screaming with laughter, all three began gesturing joyfully towards the garden. My witty partner, now dancing herself, mimed a glass being repeatedly raised to thirsty lips.
They were celebrating me. But they also were celebrating themselves.
Maybe we are not quite so lost after all.
Ross O'Carroll-Kelly is resting