St Patrick’s Day is an odd holiday for the Irish, one that even in its observance, seems a little alien. Less important to the Irish reveller than Christmas and less valued by the devoutly religious than Easter, our national holiday seems like an awfully big to-do grafted onto a minor feast day. This is probably because its modern incarnation is an American import. Though the patron saint’s day had been part of the Irish Christian calendar for centuries, it was Irish emigrants in pre-Revolutionary Boston or New York (sources differ on who got there first) that decided to make a day of it with a parade and citywide merry-making. It wound up back in the old country in the 20th century though, as with the Mexican Cinco de Mayo, it continues to be the diaspora in the United States that makes more of a fuss about it.
The time of year in which it falls is probably its biggest drawback: Spring has rarely got into full bloom in Ireland by mid-March and, more often than not, St Patrick’s Day is damp, if not uncharitably cold. In more pious times, the pretext of a respite from Lent was welcomed by a certain sector of Irish society though the Free State’s early rulers tried to close off that avenue of pleasure by outlawing pub opening on the day, something that was done away with in the 1960s (bizarrely the Dublin Dog Show was exempt from this prohibition, as a famous Flann O’Brien column once noted).
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