Ireland in three minutes

With apologies to Van Morrison, it’s almost (Irish) independence day.

This year, just like the last couple (since I emigrated from Ireland) I’ve been thinking from 4,000 miles away: what song or poem or piece of writing best sums up the Ireland and the Irish?

Not the kelly green, or lachrymose versions of “Danny Boy”, or green rivers, or a million soda bread recipes, or drinking to excess. Though there’ll be plenty of all that this weekend – at least on this side of the pond.

Then it struck me – or, rather, I heard it. As I listened to music at home last night, a song by The Gloaming – the folk/classical/progressive traditional Irish act – came on.

“The Hare” is a version of the traditional Irish tune “The Hare and the Corn” – of which I am totally unfamiliar. The Gloaming’s version is beautiful though, a fiddle performance that is short and plaintive and melodic, and it throws up all sorts of images of the homeland for me.

It may have been some dust, or the light, or a day spent staring at screens, but for a moment I swore I was standing alone, at dawn, on the flank of Mweelrea in Co Mayo, as sun and rain washed over me, with something in my eye.

Well, I was I suppose, in one way.

Here it is then – more Ireland in three minutes than you’ll get all weekend.

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Feeling Irish abroad – but maybe not today

Poet Patrick Kavanagh, 1963. Pic: NLI

What’s makes up an emigrant’s St Patrick’s Day?

Wearing green? Hitting the Irish bar(s)? Calling home? Listening to the Six Nations? Or none of the above?

It’s probably the latter for me. The most Irish thing I’ll do today is have a glass of Jameson this afternoon. The most Irish-American thing I’ll do this weekend is the Shamrock Run, a 5k in downtown Portland tomorrow morning, which attracts thousands of participants, many clad in kelly green (one of the 40 shades I’d never heard of until I moved here).

But Portland isn’t Boston or New York or even San Francisco. On a run today I spotted, in the early morning murk, a single tricolor hanging outside a house on NE 33rd Street. Yesterday a couple of colleagues wore green (as did I).

But that is the extent of St Patrick’s Day, for me. I’m tempted to pop into the local Irish bar, which is making the most of the weekend, but it looks like rain, and it’s chilly, and I’ll have to walk the dog later, so I’m not sure.

Not that this represents much change from when I used to live in Dublin. As a journalist, I worked every St Patrick’s Day, negotiating the alcohol-fueled mess of Talbot Street and the DART to get home at the end of the day. I’d wade through thousands of pictures of parades, but never bothered going to one.

Living abroad, I feel more Irish in certain moments than on certain days. A particular light in the evening will remind me of the sky over St Anne’s Park in Raheny, or a damp, clear morning will bring to mind stepping out of my dad’s house on a spring weekend. A Planxty song or a Patrick Kavanagh line or an Irish accent in the coffee shop – all of these prompt a certain small twinge, a reminder of my Irishness.

But I’m not feeling any of this today. Maybe next year, until then – go mbeirimid beo ar an am seo arís.

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