GOOD OLD Paddy's day, I missed you this year because, God love me, I was in the 20 degree warmth of Andalucia, writes Ailish Connelly.
Sadly, it appears I didn't miss that much at home, since in the last few years, our national day has descended into a groundhog day tryst of riots and disruptions, of drunken violence and fisticuffs.
This year was no exception. It wasn't always like this but, as the past is another land and perspective away, in regard to the current climate of loutery, there is no point looking back to pick over it.
Paddy's day in Andalucia slipped by with a whimper, a few sozzled Irish and English retired expats stumbling around in the sunshine, doing what they do every other day of their year, babbling incoherently into their generous measures of brandy, skin handbag-leather brown, a pickled air of desperation settled upon their shoulders.
Strangely, for the day that was in it, I pitched up in Gibraltar, a surreal stretch of Old Blighty, with duty-free shops, English bobbies, red post boxes and the pound sterling.
I finished the day staring into the face of a Barbary ape, daring him to try to snatch my handbag; an untypical St Patrick's day with no parades, no tanked-up youngsters threatening to thump the heads off each other or off innocent bystanders. Later yet we wandered through a high street boasting of shops akin to those which have taken over our own main streets, displaced and slightly disconcerting in the light and the warm spicy scents of Andalucian Spain.
Semana Santa, or Easter week, is different again. Every town and village has its own torch-lit Easter processions with one or two pasos or floats, enormous plinths that are carried shoulder high by hundreds of young men.
I spotted guys berobed in blue silk, young blades who were earlier strutting and flirting in the square, now heaving a statue of the virgin Mary or a massive crucifix up and down hills and narrow streets, in a ritual that even locals agreed seems pagan in origin.
The pasos were followed by brass bands and then penitantes, followers of the different virgins, who wear the pointed, brightly coloured, silk hats. They wear these hoods as they are supposed to remain anonymous, doing penance for their sins. Children walked also, dressed in capes and hoods, while the local women were stunning in their best black topped by long mantillas perched on their heads.
It was all very family friendly, inclusive of every age and without the menacing threat of trouble that so often accompanies public events in our own culture.
The slick ear-ringed dude was as involved as the grandmother in black lace, there was no embarrassment, no fear of censure from the peers, because it is seen as an honour to walk in the procession.
While we Irish profess ourselves to be very family orientated, I would say it has been decades since several generations walked the streets together in such an unselfconscious fashion in this country.
Good Friday was a day of family gatherings for feasting and drinking, the bars and restaurants packed to the gills for their celebrations. There was no obvious fasting, no cult of abstinence, yet no omnipresent foreboding or feverish guzzling of alcohol in case the bars might shut.
The Spanish, the Italians and the French drink more litres of wine per capita of population than the Irish or English, but they drink it as an accompaniment to food. Although there has been concern in Spain recently that some young people have adopted the foreign binge-drinking patterns, something that was unheard of even 10 years ago, it is nowhere near as big a problem as it is in Britain or Ireland.
Their parents aren't skulling back bottles of the stuff on a rainy day afternoon, having a wee drop to get through the day, a mind- numbing mother's little helper.
You can't blame the youth in Ireland when everyone else from grandma and grandad down does it, when every celebration is a cause for inebriation, whether drowning our sorrows at a funeral or wetting the head of the newborn.
When it is ubiquitous and expected and traditional and if you don't indulge, then you are just plain odd, aren't you?
What is it about us that leads us to such mad levels of over- indulgence in our favourite legal drug, alcohol, that leads us to such pain and illness, abuse and penury, dysfunction and destruction? Could it be because we never sufficiently learned how to deal with life's ups and downs, were never taught those essential coping skills while young?
We obviously though learned our drinking skills well as we watched as our forefathers self-medicated their ills with the demon drink.
Perhaps school classes in mental health, self esteem and life issues are in order, to give our young people coping mechanisms, arm them with a chance to say when enough is enough. I know it's a demand to place on teachers who already deal with overloaded schedules.
Still, our kids spend most of their school lives learning stuff they'll never need to use out in that big bad world of ours."What is it about us that leads us to such mad levels of over-indulgence in our favourite legal drug, alcohol, that leads us to such pain and illness, abuse and penury, dysfunction and destruction?