For one day, let’s show our pride in being Irish

LIKE a cabinet minister without a cabinet, I paid an official St Patrick’s festival visit to foreign parts last weekend, ending up in London just ahead of the UK capital’s annual parade. To be fair, that wasn’t the reason I was there at all – and in fact, as I wandered through Trafalgar Square on Saturday and saw the massive amount of organisation and planning under way, I was quite surprised to learn that St Patrick’s Day (or at least a close approximation of it) is A Thing at all.

I lived in London for seven years, during the end of the Troubles and the start of the fragile peace process. Although there were organised St Patrick’s-themed events in many pubs and venues, there was no central celebration of our national day. Mostly, it was a regular day, and occasionally it was an excuse for a few pints in an Irish bar in the evening. But at a time when the sky above the City of London heaved with helicopters and litter bins were removed from the streets because of the threat of IRA attacks, the ordinary decent people of London weren’t much given to celebrating Irishness. To be fair, you couldn’t blame them

Last Sunday, though, was both a revelation and a transformation. On a gloriously sunny day, thousands of people poured into Trafalgar Square and brightened up the streets all around it in their green geansaís, sprayed hair and tricolours. From grandmothers with temporarily (I hope) green hair to toddlers wearing T- shirts inviting strangers to kiss them because they were Irish, the spirit of celebration and partying was quite intoxicating – and not in the usual way that our national day is intoxicating. What amazed me most about these shiny, happy people was that as far as my ears could hear, most of them were not Irish. At least, they didn’t sound Irish. And while I’m sure many of those London accents were sported and played by second and third-generation Paddies, the point is that they didn’t have to come out last Sunday and drape themselves in green. Many of these people chose to be Irish.

And oh, what a long way we’ve come. Some 20 years ago, not far away from where I was last Sunday, I was travelling to work in a British newspaper for my Friday night subbing shift when I heard a bomb go off in nearby Canary Wharf. Literally, I felt the earth move under my feet – and instantly, I knew it was an IRA attack and that a precarious ceasefire was at an end. When I walked into the newsroom, minutes later, everyone was gathered around the television sets, grim expressions set hard. It was not a great moment to be Irish. I couldn’t help thinking about that last Sunday, in this great city that was so tangled up in fractious and frequently dangerous Irish politics for such a long time. And there they were, not just celebrating us, but choosing to be us.

God knows we are an imperfect country. And there is no doubt, ahead of tomorrow’s celebrations, that too many of us will get too drunk and too much fun will be spoilt. But at a time when we are marvelling at the long journey we have made since 1916, it is well worth remembering the even more epic path we have travelled in just 20 years. Many of us, north and south of the border, grew up honestly believing the conflict in the North would never end. And while, as the tragic events of just yesterday – when prison officer Adrian Ismay passed away having been injured in a bomb attack in Belfast – serve to show that it is still a fragile situation, it is an absolute world away from where we were.

Sometimes we are very hard on ourselves. We beat ourselves up – quite rightly – for our ramshackle politics, our chaotic drinking, our inability to get things done efficiently. But on days like these, we should remind ourselves that the rest of the world really, really likes us Irish and that we are probably the only nationality in the world that other people occasionally pretend to be. And that even our next- door neighbours, with whom we have had the most difficult relationship of all, think we’re kind of cool. Now if that’s not worth raising a glass to for one sunny St Patrick’s Day, then I don’t know what is.