For the 70 million-plus people abroad who claim Irish ancestry, today is better than Easter. Today the Irish overseas revel in their island people's glory. They belong to the island, awash in the sea, pounded by the waves of human follies.
They inhabit the same dot on the globe and are at ease, focused on good friends and relations and their own good fortune at being Irish. They have no thoughts of rebirth or resurrection, only glory in having arrived home again, having prevailed, having ascended to the best they think that humanity offers. If they do anything at all today, they rejoice in the love of their own.
It's their day. It's mine.
Abroad, Patrick is an enigma. Constant, heroic, learned, very practical and stuck on the essentials. He read a good book, built his house on a hill, got rid of the snakes and raised the lowly shamrock to greatness. His selflessness is assumed, his humility unquestionable and his mystery deep. He is unknown to most of us, but we all know he is magnificent. He is not the butt of jokes.
The www doesn't echo with rudeness about him and he is most definitely protected from the questionable company of banshees, fairies and Walt Disney. For that, may we all be thankful. We remain to endure the banalities and fantasia of modern marketing.
With Patrick as our light, we will do much today in dimness and darkness. Some of us will gather and make a donation to mark this day formally and ritually, perhaps with a society, maybe the Ireland Fund. A few have gone to Mass already, others have awoken this morning at the very hearth, paying exorbitant rates in an expensive hotel in Ireland.
Most of us will sit down with others like ourselves for food and memories. We cannot say, like some of our neighbours with exotic cuisines, that the food will be great or that it gives us our identity. It will be basic and simple, its flavours subdued, its serving quite domestic. Many can go to a local parade even if it snows and embrace the multi-cultural cadences of Ukrainian brass or Caribbean steel bands in file. Some of us will drink in pubs and curse the green beer and Tricolour cocktails.
We will cringe when outsiders wave their begorrahs and silly leprechaun hats. We will resent the veiled prejudices voiced about our drink and our laughter and staunch the thoughts that we should wear green. We will resent baleful hangers-on who seek our secrets and abuse our generosity. We will unite against darkness.
In the darkness of ignorance, Irish stereotypes are too frequent and voiced loudly, often unintentionally. Because they don't cease, our ageing as Irish people abroad is a battle to redress those small deadly wrongs. Somehow, others must understand our glory, not its stage nonsense. Surely, they could try harder to understand the wisdom and pain behind our laughter? Can they not see the decency of our spirit?
On this day, however, we celebrate it. The Irish abroad are having their day, bound together by the great civilising experience of being Irish. Incomplete and imperfect as we are abroad, we share that civilising experience with all of you on the island.
We sense a spirit within us all of having done great things. Like Patrick, we have gone to the ends of the Earth and found laughter, because it was within us. We earned it, but we don't own it. Patrick was wise when he started us off. His instructions were few and he did not sterilise the fundamental ways by which we become human, ways older and deeper than himself. He left us a spirit, not a wound and, despite scrapes and bruises from a few unloving neighbours, today we can give Patrick thanks.
Our heritage bears lightly upon us. The scribbling classes keep telling us that we have accomplished more than our proportions should allow. We are in all the classic social niches and occupations, in all the best neighbourhoods and most of the worst.
We have created the wealth of nations and the nations themselves. Pride is deadly but we cannot overlook the greatness of the Irish abroad.
In my Canadian home, Irishmen Baldwin and Hincks joined Lafontaine to create the essentials of a wonderful compromise - Ireland, England, Scotland and France. My Canadian countryman, D'Arcy McGee, turned his back on America. The mothers of our Canadian-born leaders, such as Louis St Laurent and Jean Charest, gave their sons Irish accents.
There is great division among us abroad. The US model of Irishness, sustained by the faith of its tribal individualism and driven by the certainty of positive thinking, composes the globally popular image of the Irish abroad. On St Patrick's day, the parading majorettes, costumed bands and political nobs will create a scene with which the US media will suffuse the globe.
In Dublin, too, it will be OK to play the Yank for the day. The visiting tourists in their soft shoes, flashes of green, and blue rinse will become citizens, even kings for the day. Cead Mille failte ? The Irish abroad are also not Irish in the American sense, and the brash self-indulgence of commercial nostalgia for St Patrick's own day as known by America is discomfiting. Like a rude relative,
American Irishness blocks out some countrymen who wish to conjoin with the rest. Their Irishness is un-American, predates the Famine and their sensibilities are not wrung with the victim's codes of that horror. They are resolute ly republican but cannot admit it, because nationalism and the sounds of an exclusive Irishness are unwelcoming. To those who value diversity within the tribe and are repelled by a latent racism in Irishness, political terms are far too chilling, blocking out the heat from the hearth.
As the Republic keeps its eyes on Europe and the North looks at its navel, we can see that the Irish abroad will be rent apart again. Instead of a single bridge with exchange between the new worlds, Ireland, Europe and the rest of us, there may be two spans, one built by a vigorous, somewhat incautious new Ireland, the other an incomplete and neglected pier or cul-de-sac from which no one returns.
Like the jetty on the strand at Fahan by Buncrana in 1798, it will jut to Britain and, awash in the seas, slowly erode until next March 17th, when all the strands of Ireland, at home and abroad, will again glint from the heat of Patrick's hearth.
Prof Cecil Houston is a historical geographer attached to Erindale College, the University of Toronto in Canada.