It is because of my affection for my country, rather than in spite of it, that I harbour feelings of deep ambivalence about our day of national celebration.
It has always seemed to me strange that St Patrick’s Day is so rooted in aspects of our culture that are, in themselves, sources of ambivalence.
At its most basic and literal level, it honours a man – a man who was, let’s not forget, very possibly English – whose life’s work was to convert the polytheistic people of Ireland to Christianity.
To its credit, this should serve as a reminder that there is no such thing as a pure and original national culture, that a large measure of what we think of as determining our identity came from “outside” – from the Celts, the Vikings, and the missionaries of a Christianity that was, by the time it got here, the official religion of the Roman empire.
Even the feast day itself, in its current form as a celebration of Irish culture and identity, is by no means straightforwardly Irish. The whole set-up – marching bands, floats, shamrocks, puking on the street – is largely an American innovation; the Irish diaspora in that country had been throwing parades for centuries by the time we got around to it back in the old country.
When American tourists show up here on March 17th, they have in a sense travelled thousands of kilometres to have a piece of their own culture sold back to them, chintzily rebranded with shamrocks and harps.
St Patrick’s Day feels to me like a festival centred on aspects of our culture that are not particularly worth celebrating: the conflation of religious faith and national identity, public drunkenness and the remorseless and relentless fleecing of tourists.
At the same time, I understand its historical usefulness as national branding, as an exercise in soft, twinkly-eyed power.
A strong case in point here, of course, is the annual visit of the Taoiseach to the White House, which since the Clinton administration has been a permanent fixture on the diplomatic calendar.
What measure of dignity may have once inhered in the tradition has been entirely degraded by proximity to Trump
At the level of spectacle, the ceremonial presentation to the US president of a bowl filled with shamrocks has always felt a little goofy, but in a basically harmless way. Whatever gets our guys in the door of the palace, bearing tribute for the emperor from the farther reaches of the realm, must on some level be justifiable.
This year, though, it all feels very different, and what measure of dignity may have once inhered in the tradition has been entirely degraded as all things must be degraded by proximity to Donald Trump.
There was little dignity, to begin with, in the long weeks of speculation – partly anxious, partly giddy – as to whether Micheál Martin would even receive an invitation this year.
Would he have to just book a ticket and hope for the best, hanging out in his suit and emerald green tie in a room at the Pennsylvania Avenue Marriott, gazing across at the White House in hope of a last-minute summons? Would he perhaps be forced to just brazen the thing out, showing up at a front gate security hut bearing a Waterford Crystal bowl filled with shamrocks and shattered dreams?
Whatever relief the Taoiseach might have felt on the eventual arrival of the invitation was presumably short-lived, coming as it did just hours before the shameful treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office.
The spectacle of Trump and JD Vance berating Zelenskiy – and the subsequent cutting of military aid to the country’s defence against Russia’s invasion – seems to have finally clarified, for Europe’s political leaders, that the postwar alignment of transatlantic interests has finally and irrevocably been broken.
(The AI-generated video Trump posted on social media a couple of days previously, reimagining an ethnically-cleansed Gaza as a Dubai-like playground for wealthy Trumpists was even more grotesque; unsurprisingly, it generated nothing like the same kind of disgust among European leaders.)
[ Micheál Martin should follow Macron’s playbook for handling Trump ]
The worst case scenario for Martin’s meeting on March 12th is that Trump and Vance find some occasion – Ireland’s trade surplus with the US; our government’s support, shallow and rhetorical though it largely is, for the cause of the Palestinian people – for publicly berating him.
What’s more likely, though, is the best case scenario, that the whole thing goes quite cordially: Martin speaks about the long tradition of friendship between our countries; Trump delivers a fitfully coherent eulogy to his beautiful golf links and five-star hotel in Doonbeg and the wonderful cap-doffing townsfolk thereof.
And what then? What, in this best case scenario, will have been achieved? Perhaps some lenience, in future, toward our little nation, with its famously permissive corporate tax environment and its aforementioned trade surplus with the US.
Maybe we’ll be spared the worst of what Trump’s second term has in store for the US’s other vassal states. And that’s not nothing, by any means. And even if it were nothing, it probably wouldn’t do us much good to ignore or decline the White House’s invitation, now that it’s arrived, because the last thing we want is for Trump to start talking about taking back his beautiful pharmaceutical and tech companies, which as emperor he now personally owns and operates.
But Trump is Trump, and it is entirely possible that all will go well, that he will accept the ridiculous crystal chalice of shamrocks along with the Taoiseach’s awkward personal flatteries, and then turn around the following day and announce 25 per cent tariffs on all Irish imports. Who knows, he might even take a notion to annex our little green island and turn the whole thing into a complex of luxury golf resorts.
If, as the established wisdom suggests, the St Patrick’s Day White House visit has to be done, in service of our economic reliance on American business and on the US government’s tolerance of the arrangement, then perhaps it’s time to begin changing that situation.
It increasingly feels like a strange and empty ritual, a practice of a religion in which everyone has lost faith.
