Stefanie Preissner
Reigning on the St Patrick’s Day parade
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like St Patrick’s Day is not what it used to be when they were young?
My St Patrick’s Days were spent wiggling slowly down the Main
Street in Mallow dressed in my Brownies uniform, or my gymnastics leotard, or in the costume of my latest theatre endeavour. The outfit usually reflected the sometimes fleeting enthusiasm du jour, but often it was the very action of walking in the parade that made me dump the membership, along with any uniform accoutrements I had made my mother buy.
I remember a particularly awful St Patrick’s Day around 1997, where a load of the gym club, dressed in Lycra, were instructed to do forward rolls down the town in the rain, on tarmac! We only got to stand up and rest when the sliotars of the under-10 GAA team ahead of us got away from them, and they had to scramble towards their adoring parents, who were dotted along the barrier, to have the balls returned to them.
The thing that kept us going, forward rolling, as it were, towards the finish line, was the promise of candyfloss and popcorn and hot dogs, and all the other exotics treats that lived just past the ‘stage’, in the food stalls. The stage was not what we in 2020, with our Electric Picnic and All Together Now, would recognise as a performance platform. It was more like the back of an articulated lorry with the flappy tarpaulin bits rolled up, and some of the best, least-beaten-up chairs from the secondary school plonked on top. And a microphone. There was always a microphone, wasn’t there? But it was more like a loudspeaker that constantly and inappropriately interfered with itself.
I used to think it was the same microphone that they used in
Mallow train station. Whenever the train pulled in, you’d hear an extended mumble that you knew was meant to be coherent, but simply wasn’t. Since the advent of automated announcements on trains, I’ve since learned that what was being said was: “Passengers for Banteer, Millstreet, Rathmore, Killarney, Farranfore and Tralee, please change at Mallow”.
I have such vivid memories of the parades in Mallow because there’s the sweetest, most diligent photographer in my hometown who has beautifully captured more than 35 years of regional events. Stephen Murphy worked for the Mallow Star when I was growing up, and the only reason many of us tolerated the indignities of doing acrobatics on wet tarmac was for the chance to be featured in the brimming pages of the local paper.
Recently, I find St Patrick’s Day rather hellish. I accept that I live in Dublin, so my expectations of quaint rostrums and cute children performing dance routines to Let it
Go might be misplaced. But surely it wasn’t for this that St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland?
The Liffey is ‘turned green’ in honour of the big day — which I reckon is only claimed so the tourists aren’t horrified at the pollution, and don’t realise that the Liffey is, in fact, always green.
The city is shut down to traffic, and so drunk people wearing (sometimes only) an Irish flag, and shamrock-covered Americans snake through the streets, interrupting RTE news broadcasts by shouting over the shoulder of whichever poor correspondent got the short straw.
I walked through the south side of the city one Paddy’s Day and had my walk slowed to a standstill. I took a few minutes before I realised I was actually in a queue half way down Grafton Street. Behind me, a queue had formed in the other direction. Between people waiting to get their photo taken with Phil Lynott, Molly Malone or some busking child, the city centre is a nightmare.
Where are the little candyfloss stalls? Where are the school chairs? I stay indoors during St Patrick’s Day now, and watch reruns of Friends to try to mitigate the nightmares of giant Macnas puppets that are usually triggered by the holiday.
Apparently, parades were never really associated with St Patrick’s Day in Ireland. Much like trick-ortreating, Superbowl parties and Valentine’s Day bonanzas, we adopted them from the US.
Speaking of which, did you know that the bowl of shamrock that the Taoiseach presents to the US President every Paddy’s Day is immediately destroyed by the Secret Service, because non-indigenous plant and biological items are forbidden? It’s the same reason you can’t bring Superquinn sausages with you on your J-1. How many of you have broken this rule, though? All I can think is: what an insulting thing to do to a gift! When someone comes to my house and they kindly bring flowers, even if it’s a bunch of awful chrysanthemums, I still say thank you, and put them in a vase. Destroying them? Well, that’s just rude.