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AS A TOUR guide in Dublin, one of the few days I refuse to work is, paradoxically, the day with the most tourists: St Patrick’s Day. Half a million people turned out to watch this year’s parade in Dublin, but there is very little that a guide can do to enhance their experience.
The parade needs no explanation, just a good vantage point, and afterwards the crowds of people transform Dublin into something different: a surging sea of green-clad revellers, making my usual guide routes almost impassable. Even the days leading up to it see the city invaded by people wanting to be a part of this celebration of Irishness.
In years gone by, I often braved the crowds as a dutiful parent, hoisting my son on my shoulders so at least one of us could see the parade. Now a teenager, he dwarfs me and is less impressed by such spectacles. That’s fine with me. I’m quite happy to avoid it all: the drunkenness and the leprechaun hats, the parody of Irish identity, the throngs of enthusiastic tourists.
But this year was a little different. My girlfriend — who is trying to embrace Irishness — and I wanted to experience St Patrick’s Day as Irish people do. It can often feel that the parade in Dublin is not entirely for us and maybe not even about us. It is our showcase to the world: look what we can do. It is inspired by and caters to the Irish diaspora, particularly the American part of it. And there is nothing wrong with that. But a real Irish parade is a less gaudy affair, less polished and less professional.
So we headed away from the city. The Skerries parade was scheduled for 3:00 pm; no need for an early start. Close enough to be accessible but far enough from Dublin that it could be almost anywhere in Ireland.
The small coastal town was abuzz in a very different way to the city. Few tourists here; this was a day for the local community. Most adults had young children in tow, many bedecked in flags and face paint and, yes, the leprechaun hats and shamrock glasses that have become commonplace today. But this wasn’t a spectacle; it was a ritual. A gathering of neighbours, of friends, of the local Gardai, of a town coming together to celebrate something that belongs to them.
The parade began along the coast road in this northern seaside town. Watching the performers take their places while waves crashed against the shore, the Irish standard Trasna na dTonnta (“Across the Waves”) could be heard from a loudspeaker. It was hard not to be reminded that the sea plays a big part in the story of St Patrick, and the story of the people of Ireland. An island too cold and wet to be anybody’s idea of paradise.
Even so, people have come here to Ireland again and again over the millennia, and have made their homes on this unforgiving rock, and learned to love and to tame and be tamed by its challenging beauty. Patrick himself came here twice, first as an enslaved person and later by choice, dedicating his life to the betterment of the people of Ireland. And people left, across the same sea, some forever, changing the lands that they made their home, imbuing them with an Irishness that still resonates and makes many long for a home they have never even visited.
There was no television broadcast from Skerries, no international contingency, no massive floats, no glitter Guinness. Instead, there were tractors — lots of them. No real St Patrick’s Day parade would be complete without tractors. Some were museum pieces, sixty or seventy years old, while others were shiny and new, huge American beasts with blaring horns. There were a few vintage cars, local sports and music groups marching, and children waving flags, thrilled as sweets were tossed their way.
And boats of course. Currachs made in a style far older than St Patrick, still used today. A tall-and-tanned Elvis impersonator inexplicably made his way along the route, misidentified by a small child as Michael Jackson. The local and the global, the old and the new, all merged as one truck beeped out the tune of “Baby Shark” on its horn. Simple and sweet and kitsch, it had those elements of the parades I remember as a child in Wexford, filtered through a new generation. The Irish are still farmers and fishermen but part of an ever-shrinking world and an ever-changing global and globalised community.
One of several Saints Patrick in the parade wore a robe adorned with plastic waste collected from the beach, highlighting what is both a local and a global issue. The Irish national identity has always necessarily been political.
A small island, dwarfed and divided by a larger neighbour, we have always had to fight to survive. We have had to leave our home to learn to love it. We have had to adapt to ever-changing fortunes. We have had to survive the Vikings, the British, the Catholic Church, even as we absorbed the best they had to offer: this is what is known widely, and what I share with tourists. We have to wrestle now as a nation with global challenges. Rising sea levels and changing weather patterns threaten our way of life. And we must adapt, as we have so often done before.
Just as the Christianity that Patrick brought layered itself over older beliefs without entirely erasing them, modern Ireland embraces and absorbs new cultures while keeping its essence intact. Culture is a conversation between the past and the present, between the present and the absent, the local and the global. It changes, always, battered by waves of immigration and emigration, by war and by famine, by outside influences benign and malignant. But it survives.
Irishness is robust, clinging stubbornly to a cold grey rock in the North Atlantic and spreading relentlessly to every corner of the world. Taking the best the world has to offer and making it our own. Too small to take over the world by force, we do it instead with soft power. With songs and stories. With charm and diplomacy, a disarming friendliness, and a welcoming nature that belies our stubborn insistence on doing things our way.
There are many ways of being Irish, now more than ever. In Dublin, as elsewhere around the world, many of those celebrating were Irish for a day. But in Skerries — as in so many towns and villages throughout Ireland — there were those whose Irishness dates back generations and those for whom this was their first parade. Some are Irish by circumstance, and some by choice. Our culture and identity are strong enough to include all of them.
Derek Walsh is a tour guide and writer from Wexford and based in Dublin.
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