What St. Patrick’s Day Won’t Tell You About Being Irish

Whiskey, Wakes, and the Ghosts We Carry

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St. Patrick’s Day has always been bittersweet for me.

For most, it’s a day of revelry — parades, pints, and people belting out half-remembered Irish ballads. But for my family, it began with a memorial mass and a trip to the graveyard. My grandfather died on March 17th, hit by a bus on his way home from a Paddy’s Day horse race.

That’s the shadow that has always loomed over the green bunting and Guinness-fueled celebrations.

Celebrate good times, come on

With St Paddy’s Day (March 17th) being a national holiday in Ireland, we all got the day off.

Kids would throw on something green and follow their parents to the local town/village parade, where tractors are hastily repurposed as floats, and your mate’s uncle staggers at the top of the procession in a novelty green hat and white beard, declaring himself the ‘real’ St. Patrick.

For most adults, it’s a day of delirium, of gaudy garb and green-dyed pints (in America anyway — I never even saw a green beef until I left Ireland), of marching bands and bodhráns, of bleary-eyed revelers spilling into the streets, stumbling through song, through sentiment, through…