Hmm? What’s that you say? Oh, right—Saint Patrick’s Day?
Why, so it is.
It’s my take that “celebrating” the day is primarily a
function of the Irish in America, who had huge chips on their shoulders what
with being second-class citizens here. (They were not seen as particularly good
for property values, particularly after the mass immigration following the
Great Famine of the 1840s.) So they were putting on a swagger to flip the WASPS
the bird.
Back in Ireland—eh, not so much. Yes, it was made a
public holiday in 1903 as part of the whole idea of public (“bank”) holidays in
the UK. But shortly afterward, another law was enacted that closed all drinking
establishments for the day. (That stayed in effect until the 1970s.) So—not really
so jolly.
(In the 1990s the Irish kind of woke up to the notion
that Americans of all backgrounds used 17th March as a jumping-off
point for huge drink fests—including green beer in copious quantities. So in
1996 the government started “Saint Patrick’s Festival” to showcase the country
and its industries. The next year it was a three-day event, kind of like your
average Polish wedding.)
Okay, now that I’ve got that background out of the way,
on to the Gratitude part of this Monday. I’ve always loved those right-brained,
sweet-talking, ballad-singing, beauty-loving, cynically-inclined Irish, both
here and in the old country. Especially now that I’ve been working in various
areas of the tech industry for 20 years, where my right-brained, clear-talking,
synapse-skipping cynical inclination sticks out like a lighthouse in a sea of tee-shirted
and flip-flopped network engineers and software developers.
The Irish give me comfort and hope, reminding me that being
this different is only a problem if you let the surprisingly cookie-cutter narrow-mindedness
of the people here in the Valley they call Silicon (who consider themselves the
very vortex of innovative thinking and yet seem to have been implanted with
virtual blinkers the instant they set up their first incubator) impose their
values on you.
Yeah—Irish history is not a placid sail through drifts of
rose petals. Hard, bloody, vicious even, with a lot of beat downs. And the fat
lady has not yet appeared on the stage; so there’s a ways to go. But still they
rise. Ya gotta love that.
In the past I’ve given you some music
from Ireland, and Yeats;
of course, Yeats. Feel free to reprise the pleasure; no charge. Even a small
treatise on whiskey
in Ireland.
So this time around I’ll just share a couple of my
favorite photos from my trip there.
Kilmainham Gaol was built in 1796. It was intended to be a
model of new prison management philosophies; but two years later there was a
rebellion, and the building had to take on a slew of political prisoners, so
that whole enlightenment thing pretty much went out the window.
It’s perhaps best known for holding 15 leaders of the
Irish Uprising after the British suppressed it in April 1916. They were all
executed in the courtyard by firing squad. One, Joseph Connolly, had been so
badly wounded in the fighting that the Brits had to sit him in a chair for his
execution; he couldn’t stand. It’s an ugly place, that courtyard, and the Irish
pretty much keep it that way as a reminder.
I was taken by one of the doors—long since bolted shut—in
that courtyard, and this is what I shot.
But then, we’ll return to the whole drinking aspect
mentioned earlier. Here’s a pub in Dublin, early afternoon.
This is how you should drink, not crammed up against 1673
people you don’t know, all wearing green and yelling “begorrah” while slurping
down green beer.
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