LEAFING through the venerable Oxford Companion to the Year recently, I was alarmed by one of the entries for March 17th, writes Frank McNally.
There was the usual stuff about St Patrick and Ireland's national day. But the book adds that, according to some traditions, March 17th was also the date "on which Eve was seduced by the serpent, and Adam sinned".
My first reaction was to bridle. This looked like yet another English attempt to implicate their next-door neighbours in a controversial event: one that even predated the existence of nationalities. The words "miscarriage of justice" leapt to mind.
But then I remembered St Patrick's alleged zero-tolerance campaign against snakes, and Adam's March 17th connection began to make some sense. I also remembered what the centre of Dublin looks like after the parade every year. And again I had to admit that, right enough, it does sometimes evoke the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Man.
The mountains of litter and rivers of drink-related material would not be so sinister in themselves. But ever since the Macnas-isation of the parade a decade or so, there has also been an added element of ghoulishness. It only takes the sight of a few grotesquely masked vestiges of the pageant, crawling home through the squalor, and suddenly, the whole picture could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch.
The doomed atmosphere is occasionally embellished by the presence of Northern evangelists warning us of the need to repent. Writing the annual parade "colour piece" for the paper, I used occasionally to meet Wilmer Ardis, a missionary from North Armagh who liked to visit Dublin on March 17th, attracted by the unprecedented numbers of lost souls available.
Once, post-parade, I met him preaching to nobody in particular on College Green - which, despite the detergent that somebody had recently added to the Thomas Davis fountain, was in dire need of cleansing, physical and spiritual. And in search of a balancing quote to all the stuff about it being a great day for the Irish, I asked Wilmer what he thought of the new-style themed parade, with its ghosts and goblins.
He was reluctant to comment, he said, lest his words sound "harsh". Then he commented anyway: "One man told me: 'Wilmer, you're the only man talkin' about St Patrick here. All the rest is idolatry'." I didn't share Wilmer's dislike for the reconstituted parade. It will take another 50 years or so before I start feeling nostalgic for the old one, in which the theme every year was "crepe paper" and half the floats were thinly disguised ads for the Abel alarm company. And I don't even remember (or want to) the even older March 17th in Ireland, when it was still exclusively a holy day and the pubs stayed closed.
But the new, all-singing, all-drinking St Patrick's Day can bring out your inner puritan, especially when you're abroad. At least here, the day still has some context. But from Cheltenham to Chicago, the festival is now promoted - with evangelical zeal - by pubs and drinks companies. Culture and history don't come into it, never mind religion. The only theme is the need to drink - or "party Irish-style" to use the preferred euphemism.
AS IF it is not weighed down with enough significance already, March 17th has yet another historico-religious role. In the England of the Middle Ages, apparently, it was held to be the day "on which Noah entered the Ark". Again, there is a certain plausibility about this link, given the weather that mid-March often produces in these parts (although if there had been an Ark available in Ireland last year, it would have sailed in June).
But for one reason or another, March 17th is clearly a very influential date in the church calendar. Other saints' days are moveable, but (except when it falls in Holy Week, as this year), not St Patrick's, which was important enough to escape the Vatican II purge in which a number of religious days that involved feasting were ousted from Lent. Saints Thomas Aquinas, Gregory, and Benedict all had to go. Only Patrick stood his ground.
Perhaps it is also the saint's political clout that protects the unique privilege by which his people get to close down central New York for a day every year. Even the Italians have to confine their Columbus Day celebrations to a bank-holiday Monday, when the effect on business is minimal. Only the Irish get to march up Fifth Avenue on a fixed date, regardless of which day of the week it is, in what my Italian-Irish friend calls a "traffic-slaughtering display of power".
Maybe a New York version of the Garvaghy Road residents' association will spring up eventually, objecting to the inconvenience involved in the Ancient Order of Hibernians' insistence on marching their traditional route.
Then again, the relentless globalisation of the festival means that participation is no longer limited on ethnic grounds, making opposition harder to mount. This is the genius of the international St Patrick's Day brand. Anyone can participate. All you need is a tenuous collection with the "old country" - or the Garden of Eden, as it was better known.