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 after
working in various areas of the tech industry for 30 years, where my
right-brained, clear-talking, synapse-skipping cynical inclination stuck 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 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; 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
few photos from my trips 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.
Up in Ulster, the first colony of Britain,
and the last one standing, there’s a three-story high wall between the
sectarian neighborhoods of Belfast. The community has used art as a means to
mitigate it’s ugliness. There’s one section open to the public for comment, and
you’ll notice that in 2019 the Irish had well got the Kleptocrat’s measure. Stevie,
my tour guide, gave me a pen, and I added a line from Robert Frost: “Something
there is that doesn't love a wall.”
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.
©2025 Bas Bleu
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