Recently in Oirland Category

Last year, I declared a truce with St. Patrick's Day. So you won't be reading any new screeds against the holiday on this site. No, instead, you will read recycled screeds.

I wrote a post several years ago on a now-defunct sports site about the Venn intersection of this holiday, Gaelic football, and my paternal grandfather. A year later, I expanded said post for this site, because that old site was completely dismantled by its owners. (You can still find Geocities pages about Mother Theresa eating someone's balls from 12 years ago, but this sports site I labored on for 2+ years has vanished. Go figure.)

I like this post a lot (if I'm allowed to like stuff I wrote), and if you're newish to this site, you may not have seen it before. So I present to you now "The Calvinball of the Emerald Isle. (Original post here.)

Okay, St. Patrick's Day, I call a truce. I've spent way too much time being angry at you for reasons I don't even fully understand. So I'm not going to write any more angry anti-St. Patty's Day screeds. In return, if you could make sure that my stoop doesn't have puke on it when I get home from work, then we're cool.

I inherited my resentment against the holiday from my father, who had wildly schizophrenic views on his homeland. He lived the first 10 years of his life in an Ireland that was extremely poor, extremely repressive, and just overall depressing. I think he blamed Ireland for the misery of his early years, and the issues of his later ones.

Mind you, he had a healthy amount of pride about being Irish. But he also couldn't stand a lot of phonus balonus that goes along with Oirish-American celebrations. He loved to cite historical instances of the Irish getting the shaft from world, but he also hated when Irish people would insist on the MOPE Syndrome (that they, and only they, were the Most Oppressed People Ever).

He loved to point out famous/accomplished Irishmen, and also loved to point out that a large number of them had leave Ireland to get any measure of success (or at least not be stoned to death). Conversely, he was a huge fan of English comedy in general, but when he was offered a job at Reuters, he scoffed, "I can't work for them--they're an English company." This statement was notable for its lack of sarcasm, as my father rarely said anything not sarcastic.

I've spent much of my life mimicking his stances on Ireland, St. Patty's Day, etc. But I now realize it's more of a burden than anything else. I've been to Ireland a few times, and it's nothing like what it was in his youth. In other words, I've been carrying around his resentments so they can live on somehow, even though they're resentments for a place that doesn't exist anymore.

So you wanna get shitfaced on St. Patrick's Day even if your last name is Lewandowski? Knock yourself out. I shan't take part, but who am I to keep you from destroying your liver?

I should be grateful that I'm part of an ethnic group that is so assimilated into American culture that it can totally revel in all of its unsavory stereotypes. When people joke about how the Irish are drunks and fight all the time, what do Irish people do? Laugh, usually. They know it's true, and they don't have to waste any time defending themselves, because they no longer have to fight true, institutionalized discrimination.

That's my wish for every ethnic group: That one day you shall be able to freely give vent to the worst aspects of your character, and everyone will think it's hilarious.

If you're in the mood for some green-tinted Haterade, peep these two posts from years past:

The Calvinball of the Emerald Isle, 03.16.07

The Quare Fellows, 03.17.06

Meanwhile, as part of my peace offering to St. Patrick's Day, I offer some tunes from Hibernophile rocker Ted Leo.

"Biomusicology", The Tyrrany of Distance

"Dirty Old Town", Tell Balgeary Balgury Is Dead EP

"A Bottle of Buckie", Living for the Living

"Fairytale of New York", live on WFMU, 2007

Around this time last year,I wrote a more compact version of this tale for MSN Sports Filter. But since that site has passed into the Interweb Graveyard, I hope you'll indulge me in recycling seasonal material.

My grandfather--my father's father--died when I was 8 years old. So my memories of him are vague and littered with the weird, stupid things that little kids think are important. It takes a lot of mental power to pull out what I actually remember of him after I sift through all the Transformers and Thundercats and Mad Magazines.

I remember that I thought my grandfather had a funny voice, which I now realize was an Irish accent lathered with tar from decades of smoking Winstons. I remember that he always smiled, a smile with his teeth half-parted, as if he was about ready to laugh, though I don't remember ever hearing him laugh. I remember that he had glasses with thick, gauzy lenses that made it hard to see even the faintest traces of his eyes. I probably couldn't have seen his eyes anyway, because he seemed about 10 feet tall to me.

I remember that his fridge was always stocked with this strange slightly carbonated red lemonade that he brought back with him from his frequent trips to Ireland. I searched in vain for it both times I was in Dublin, but I couldn't find it because I didn't quite know what I was looking for. No one else in my family remembers it, leading me to believe it was just some weird beverage my mind concocted while I was puzzling out adventures for Optimus Prime.

He was born just before Ireland gained its independence, became an adult just as the Depression hit, and fled to America on his own after World War II. So he didn't have the good fortune of living in easy times. Post-war Ireland was a pretty brutal time and place, even by the low standards that Ireland had for an acceptable economy. He left his wife and children behind and worked in New York for three years before he had enough money to send for them. He was a baggage handler at JFK's TWA terminal for almost thirty years. My mom still has his retirement gift in our basement: a wooden plaque with a barometer and thermometer mounted on it, neither of which ever worked.

Hey, it's time for my annual anti-St. Patrick's Day rant!

I actually didn't want to write anything on the subject this year. Having just returned from the Emerald Isle, I've had enough of pubs and shamrocks and whatnot for a while. And I really wanted to move forward with the recounting of my trip overseas. Then I heard this:

"In the Irish Times interview, [NY St. Patrick's parade chairman John] Dunleavy said, 'If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow Neo-Nazis into their parade? If African Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?'"