I could not be more proud of my nation, or our national day: but I’m sick to death of **** leprechauns!
YOU will see them everywhere tomorrow. As soon as there’s a close-up of the crowd at the St Patrick’s Day parades here at home, or at the Grand Slam showdown in Twickenham, or on the sidewalks along Fifth Avenue in New York, indeed anywhere there’s even the smallest celebration of the national saint, it is a given there will be leprechauns.
You’ll see tall ones as well as small ones, which rather misses the point. You’ll see male ones and female ones, even though we all know there are no female leprechauns. You’ll see lots of them dribbling pints of stout down their manky nylon beards as they use one hand to hold the glass and the other to tap innocent passers-by on the head with inflatable shillelaghs.
Mythical
Honestly, are we mad? Have we lost the run of ourselves completely? Have we no pride? We celebrate our nationality, our very Irishness, by dressing as a mythical little man known the world over for his aptitude for trickery. Every single story you ever read about leprechauns portrays them as vile creatures, covetous of their gold, contemptuous of all who encounter them, venal, cunning and spiteful, even the sort who’d steal a baby from its cot and hold it for ransom.
They distil their own whiskey, which some say accounts for their belligerence, neatly playing into another stereotype, that of the boozing, fighting Irish, who when not comically holding up their tiny fists in fits of aggression, are trying to bamboozle instead with words and riddles (another piece of lazy typecasting, that of the loquacious Irish who didn’t just kiss the Blarney Stone, but ate it instead).
Perhaps female leprechauns would soften the image, but sure why would there actually be any, when their only chance of male company is with someone who drinks all day, never shuts up, riles everyone he encounters, and would trick them out of the housekeeping money just for the fun of it?
There are, I imagine, few nationalities in the world that would be comfortable associating themselves with such a thoroughly contemptible expression of their identity. You can’t exactly see financiers annually marching down Wall Street dressed as pyramids to draw attention to their fondness for Ponzi schemes – but we Irish have no problem dressing up as the little guy who’d trick you into looking in the opposite direction while he extracted the last fiver from your wallet.
And because we do it, others think it’s what they should do, too. On March 17 last year, I was in Malta – Malta, for heaven’s sake, where I thought I’d escape the whole madness – for a friend’s wedding, and amid the cluster of Irish bars in St Julian’s, looking onto Spinola Bay, not only had an entire Irish village been set up, it was thronged with leprechauns of all shapes and sizes. I physically shuddered.
I can’t tell you how much I hate it. It makes my blood fizz to the sort of temperature usually possible only in lab conditions under maximum security.
Ridiculous
The big hats. The fake red beards. The double-breasted jackets, bow ties, pantaloons, socks, and ridiculous brogues with buckles. Even those who dress this way must know how stupid it looks, because they’re always in threes and fours for moral support. No one ever went to an Irish match alone dressed as a leprechaun unless he was what my late father would have called a complete gobaloon (I lie – the adjective wouldn’t have been ‘complete’, but this is a family newspaper), and those close to him frankly would forcibly suggest he get professional help.
Admittedly, we’re not the only ones who wear fancy dress on the national day or when supporting our teams, and, yes, I think the Welsh who go to rugby matches dressed as daffodils or dragons, or the English lads who turn up at every game in the chainmail and tabards of the Crusaders, look equally foolish.
None of these things, though, is of itself offensive. There’s nothing wrong with a daffodil or a dragon, or even a misguided attempt to look like the least celebrated saint in these islands.
A 2009 YouGov survey found that seven in ten young English people didn’t know St George’s Day was on April 23, and 40% of all English people had no idea why he was their patron saint. Every child in Ireland knows when St Patrick’s Day falls, because traditionally we all got a day off Lent and were allowed to eat chocolate and sweets, and also because of the parades. So why not dress up as a big shamrock or even as the saint himself, instead of buying plush hats and fake beards and pretending to be extras in Darby O’Gill And The Little People?
Tolerance
We even use leprechauns as a marketing tool. Carlingford in Co. Louth hosts an annual leprechaun hunt and European Union officials were even convinced – or, more likely, told what to do or they’d never get the baby back – to anoint Slieve Foy Mountain on the Cooley Peninsula as a ‘Designated Area of Protection for Flora, Fauna, Wild Animals and Little People’ under the EU Habitats Directive. It’s stuff like that that makes the Brexit vote a little easier to understand.
Thankfully, not everyone had a tolerance for this sort of tomfoolery. As far back as 1963, former taoiseach John A Costello lamented the use of the little people in tourism marketing. ‘For many years, we were afflicted with the miserable trivialities of our tourist advertising,’ he told the Oireachtas. ‘Sometimes it descended to the lowest depths, to the caubeen and the shillelagh, not to speak of the leprechaun.’
And he was right. The Government released a stunning short film this week encouraging tourists to come here, invest here, and even live here, and the images were of magnificent scenery, vibrant sporting and cultural activities, top-class food and the like. It was refreshingly free of Paddywhackery, and that also meant, thankfully, there wasn’t a leprechaun in sight – though there actually was a rainbow, and we all know who you might find at the end of that, trying to stop you stealing his pot of gold.
Above all, though, it’s embarrassing that we parade ourselves looking little different to the notorious caricatures of the Irish in Punch magazine in the 19th century. We are complicit in perpetuating a stereotype that has absolutely nothing to do with my sense of Irishness, but instead just gets my goat. If someone could only invent a hybrid of live television and the PlayStation, I would happily sit through coverage of the parades and the match tomorrow with controls in hand and vapourise every leprechaun that popped into shot, preferably with an accompanying high-pitched squeaky shout of, ‘Oh, be the hokey!’ as he disappeared into the ether.
Honestly, it’s time we all grew up. Leave the costumes at home and dress the way real people dress and let’s get rid of the leprechaun forever. Meanwhile, I wish you all a very happy St Patrick’s Day!