St Patrick's Day - celebrating a wider, vaguer Irishness

CultureShock:Paradoxically, we're getting better at celebrating St Patrick's Day precisely because we no longer really know what it is to be Irish.

There are few things more authentically Irish than a St Patrick's parade, a ritual that began with the British army and took hold in the cities of the eastern seaboard of North America. The first piece of Irish literature to take the day as its framework, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's short farce St Patrick's Day, written in 1775, is set among Irish soldiers in England. They present their leader, Lieut O'Connor, with the traditional trappings of the day: a soldier declares that "I put a great shamrock in his hat this morning, and I'll be bound for him he'll wear it, was it as big as Stephen's Green". Then they head off declaring "we'll parade round the Market-cross, for the honour of King George". Their cry is "St Patrick, his honour, and strong beer for ever!" Some of the rituals - the shamrock and the strong beer - remain central to the occasion. King George has been conveniently forgotten.

But it was also Irish soldiers serving in the British forces who made the parade a part of the American cultural landscape. There is some evidence of a parade in Boston in the 1730s, organised by an Irish charity, but it took off in the 1760s in New York, when soldiers marched in honour of the saint. That the British authorities seem to have had no great problem with these demonstrations of national identity comes down to the cultural context. The whole notion of national saints actually fit quite comfortably into the evolving concept of the United Kingdom as a multinational entity in which Irish, Welsh and Scottish identities could be expressed through the grander imperial project. That St Patrick's Day evolved into expressions of quite different notions of Irishness - the ethnic solidarity of Catholic Irish-America or the unity of church and State in independent Ireland - reminds us that the festival is a testament, not to the timeless endurance of Irishness, but to its almost infinite malleability.

Even in its standard American form, the St Patrick's Day parade was never what it used to be. The earliest example I know of a complaint that the parade has lost its authenticity comes from the great Chicago-Irish satirist Peter Finley Dunne, through his fictional spokesman, the philosopher-bar tender Mr Dooley. In 1896, we find Mr Dooley complaining, in his thick brogue, that the Chicago parade has come to be dominated by sleek politicians and commercial interests: "Sure I'd've give an eye to be back at th'ol times befure they put on style an'thried to impriss th' wur-ruld with how many votes we cud tur-rn out rain 'r shine. 'Twas Pathrick's Day thin. But now it might as well be th'ann-ivarsary iv th'openin' iv th' first clothin' store in Chicago."

There isn't much room for nostalgia when we remember the miserable procession of tacky commercial floats and blue-thighed majorettes freezing in the cold winds of March that made up the Dublin parade before its Celtic Tiger revamp in the 1990s.

Contrary to Mr Dooley, the Dublin parade is much better for putting on the style. But the very fact that Patrick's Day could be so thoroughly and deliberately reinvented points to an underlying paradox. We're getting better at celebrating St Patrick's Day precisely because we don't really know what it is to be Irish.

The markers of the identity that was created in the 19th century - Daniel Corkery's famous trinity of land, nationality and religion - have been swept away. Most of us don't live on the land any more. Our sense of nationality has been usefully and richly complicated by the Belfast Agreement, by inward migration and by the European Union. Religion has both weakened its grip and become vastly more diverse. It is not accidental that if you want to name a new piece of public infrastructure in Ireland now, you don't do it after a martyr from the national struggle or after a saint. You name it after a writer or an artist. Writers and artists are the definers of Irishness now, and their definitions are, of their nature, subversive, contingent, critical, made up more of questions than of answers.

Perhaps in this sense, St Patrick's Day in Ireland is becoming what St Patrick's Day has long been in the US: a day on which everyone pretends to be Irish. A few years ago, in his study of Irish-Americans in Albany, the sociologist Reginald Byron noted of St Patrick's Day that "There are no longer any recognisable symbolic practices that belong exclusively to people of Irish descent . . . The remaining icons of Irishness . . . now belong to everyone, and anyone is free to play with these public symbols of Irishness, whether they have several Irish ancestors, just one or two, or even none at all . . . For people whose ancestry is complicated or indeterminate, Irishness, with its generally positive cultural associations, is a kind of generic ethnic identity that can be assumed when the occasion demands it: when the census-taker on the doorstep demands to know one's ancestry . . . or on St Patrick's Day." What's true of Albany may now be just as true, and just as useful, in Dublin, Cork or Galway.