What no shamrock, Brian?

St Patrick’s day is a festival that has lost its way. When I was a child it did not mean, as it seems to do now, even for those who have no connection with Ireland, going to a bar and getting hammered. Instead it was about asserting our Irish identity. All day long we wore the shamrock which had been sent over to us, packaged in damp cotton wool, by our relatives in Ireland.

We did so with defiance because it inevitably meant running the gauntlet of insults at school since being Irish was not cool then, as it seems to have become now. IRA bombs were going off at regular intervals. Irish people, far from being lovable comedy rogues with sexy accents, were, at best, the butt of jokes about the famous stupidity of the Celt, at worst the hate-filled Muslims of the nineteen seventies.

All that has changed. March the seventeenth has become a festival of drink, a part of the marketing strategy of Guinness. It has been annexed by politically correct councils who feel it is appropriate to spend council tax payers' money promoting Irish cultural events but who would never dream of using the same funds to promote events on St George’s day. It does not belong to the Irish any more. It is simply another stop on the global cultural bus route.

If I Had Nothing But A Kitten

My mother was awarded the Fainne, a badge given to people who could speak the Irish language fluently. It was something that Irish people of her generation wore with a good deal of pride. Sadly, I don’t speak the language at all since there wasn’t a lot of call for it in East London where I grew up.

Recently I was looking through one of my mother’s school books, A First Course In Irish Composition, originally written in 1925, though my mother’s edition was published in 1941. Even a cursory glance shows clearly how the shape and structure of the Irish language affected the way that Irish people came to speak English.

Below are English translations of a number of Irish proverbs that appear in the book. Some of them are hilarious, some are mystifying and some are like zen koans.

If I had nothing but a kitten I would be in the middle of the fair with it.
He who walks a long road grinds both fine and coarse.
The biggest war that ever there was someone came safe out of it.
The beginning of a shower is mist, the end of a battle is strife.
Putting off a thing is a putting that the thing is not the better of.

And here are three for writers to consider:

His own story is everybody’s story.
It is a bad thing not to have a story on the tip of your tongue.
Don’t judge the first story till the second story reaches you.