Pádraig Belton

Shamrocks, green beer and leprechauns – the sheer un-Irishness of St Patrick’s Day

March is the cruellest month if you’re Irish and venture out of Ireland, breeding plastic leprechauns from dead Tesco aisles, mixing green food colouring with American beer, and stirring dull copy from hacks. Come the third week of March, the Huffington Post is telling us how to make green beer – handy for me as I live in Ireland and have never seen it. The Guardian tells us New York’s police eased public drinking and urination laws before St Patrick’s Day. The Wall Street Journal notes the current American craze for leprechaun traps, ‘a tradition that is unknown to many in Ireland.’

Now we have the seeds of #Shamrockgate. From 1901 until last year, a female royal presented shamrock to the Irish Guards. But the Duchess of Cambridge pulled out of today’s ceremony, leaving Prince William to do the job for her. It is, of course, Saint Patrick’s Day, that remarkable assault on taste and Irish national sensibility, perpetrated annually everywhere but in Ireland with green loo roll and greeting cards bearing drunken leprechauns, depicted more often than not in the act of baring their buttocks.

Most Irish people who encounter the phenomenon overseas are bemused and stunned. In 1960, a diplomat cabled from Boston to the Department of Foreign Affairs that his entire work was undone before his very eyes by ‘shamrocks, green ties, caubeens, leprechauns and clay pipes.’

Two years later, another Irish envoy gripes to Dublin: ‘Many Irish people would find offensive the green top hats, the shillelaghs, the green carnations, green beer, green whiskey and even green traffic lanes.’ It’s Oirish ­– Paddy the tireless vaudeville employee, setting down a sustaining diet of green beer and praties for a quick shillelagh brawl.

I suppose the seamróg has at least got a distinguished pedigree. Wearing

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