Grandad was killed by the Paddy’s Day parade but March 17 has made up for it

Me and St Patrick’s Day: it’s complicated. I have vague early memories of sitting on my Dad’s shoulders at the parade, waiting for the Abel alarms float which was pretty much the only thing that was in colour in the Ireland of the early 1970s. The memory might have been halcyon enough if my Granny hadn’t informed me, when I was still very young, that her own father had died because he went to the St Patrick’s Day parade without his overcoat. While there was some element of truth in that claim — the poor man died of pneumonia some weeks after he got soaked while waiting the 1920s equivalent of the Abel alarms float — my tiny takeaway was that my great grandad had been killed by the St Patrick’s Day parade. It was hard to love it after that: surviving it became my sole aim.

There were some years where it was so cold that catching your death really did seem a probability. But there were also balmy days: when I was pregnant with The Boy, my Dad got sunburn carrying The Small Girl on his shoulders while I happily roasted beside them. Those were some of my favourite St Patrick’s Days: the parade had actually become watchable, and there were fantastic afternoons in the GAA club when all the small children ran around in delighted packs and, relieved of the responsibility of chasing after them, we parents sat around in even more delighted packs in the bar.

But it didn’t last. Somewhere in the middle of all those happy national days, I was given family tickets for a viewing platform for the parade, which turned out to be a disaster because once they’d experienced the novelty of sitting down and being able to actually see what was going on, my kids absolutely refused to revert to standing behind tall people in hats for the remainder of their childhood parades. So that was us, prematurely done with the whole business.

And the GAA club wasn’t long following it. When The Small Girl was still a very young teenager (I am literally too ashamed to tell you how young), she went out with friends one Patrick’s morning and arrived back plastered a couple of hours later. Her Dad and The Boy had already gone over to the club and I was to follow with the excited Youngest who had a date with her friends, but suddenly I found myself in a shouting match with a volatile drunk child who was threatening to run away or kill herself, whichever was easier. Fearing she’d choose the latter option, I locked her in the downstairs toilet while I dropped the fascinated Youngest over to the club. On the way, we met another dad, and The Youngest cheerfully informed him that I’d left her older sister locked (in every sense) in the downstairs toilet. I can still see the look of horror on his face, coincidentally more or less mirrored on my neighbour’s face when I returned home, minutes later, to discover that The Small Girl had managed to activate the house alarm and he had used his spare key to come in, turn it off, and release the crazy, hammering, hammered prisoner. I sometimes wonder why they didn’t move house after that. Anyway, for obvious reasons I never made it to the GAA club myself that day and the whole incident was so horrible that I never went back on subsequent patron days either.

Then there was the St Patrick’s Day like no other. We watched The Scratch play the first of what would be many live-streamed gigs that day and we drank cans (thankfully, everyone was over-age by then) and I don’t know that day if we were more excited by the novelty of Covid or terrified of dying from it.

Then, two years ago, a subtle shift in my hostilities with the patron saint. The parade might be a busted flush for my kids, but we did go into Collins Barracks afterwards, where we ran into my sister and her kids and together we passed a perfectly pleasant few hours surrounded by good music, nice food and shiny, happy people. And last year, we did it again — this time by design — and added our other sister to the menu. Later on that evening, I went to hear decent Irish music played by a bunch of men, one of whom I’d been on a date with a week previously. And at the end of the night, we shared our first kiss. So a hundred years after he killed my great grandfather, maybe there’s hope for me and St Patrick after all.