Drowning the shamrock my eye! more like we drowned ourselves

ST Patrick’s Day just gone was my birthday, but you don’t expect me to tell you which one it was, do you? Anyway, I can’t, because the figures mightn’t add up.

Oh, you know what I mean. I was always partial to taking a couple of years off the total now and again when it suited me, and I even added a couple of years once when proof of maturity was required – something I lived to regret.

Suffice it to say that I was born on a St Patrick’s Day in the middle of the last century. So I’d better start getting the figures in order soon or I’ll miss out on the President’s cheque when the time comes. No-one will believe me when I’m 100!
Anyway, I had a quiet birthday, as befits this particular milestone in my life, while the rest of the country indulged in the usual raucous binge.

The downside to being born on St Patrick’s Day is that you have to share the celebrations with the whole nation as well as the ever burgeoning diaspora. It wasn’t always like that. I can remember a time when St Patrick’s Day was all about me.
Patrick may have been long dislodged from the list of official saints, but somehow or other, for better or for worse, we’ve managed to turn him into a secular saint and despite his abstemious nature, we’ve given him a reputation that Bacchus himself must be envying.

The whole country went on a bender last week when they should have been at Mass or reciting Patrick’s breastplate, as a wellness mantra.

Meanwhile, the Government - or the best part of it - was on a worldwide junket trying to persuade the rest of mankind that we Irish really are as great as we always knew we were ourselves. Look at us! We’re sloshed!

A report issued a couple of days before St Patrick’s Day indicated that despite the closure of so many rural pubs up and down the country, we’re bigger boozers now than we ever were, with the average drinker downing the equivalent of a bottle of Vodka every single week.

I would say that on the feast of Patrick – and me – the average drinker downed a couple of bottles in the one day. Drowning the shamrock, my eye! More like, we drowned ourselves.

There was even worse news when a separate report announced that adolescent girls in Ireland now have one of the highest levels of binge drinking in the world. We’re third in the pecking order apparently, behind Denmark and Finland, for female adolescent alcohol consumption.

I don’t know where all those young girls are getting the money to be able to compete so successfully with the world’s top boozers. A bottle of Dwan’s or Nash’s Lemonade was as much as I could aspire to at their age – and I only got that on my birthday or when I was sick.

There was no booze in the ‘Ballroom of Romance’ either and most young fellows didn’t stand a chance of getting a girl to dance if he wasn’t sporting a pioneer pin.

I remember once at a dance in the Premier Ballroom in Thurles, when Joe Dolan was in full flight, a friend was asked up to dance by a plausible young man with the obligatory pioneer pin. He was being buffeted about in the mad stampede to find a partner as the waltz began, so she didn’t notice that he was legless until they were well out on the floor. Abandoning him forthwith, she stomped furiously back to her place by the wall, muttering under her breath about the unreliability of the pin.
How we got from there to here has a lot to do with our changing notions of respectability. Stifling and all as it was, we were never among the world’s heaviest drinkers when we were slaves to respectability, although I knew a man in my youth who became a legend in the neighbourhood after “drinking two farms” in his lifetime. At least an adolescent girl wouldn’t be seen dead in a pub – except maybe in the snug.

Maybe we should try and retrieve our old respectability then, and keep our voices down on St Patrick’s Day.
Oh I know I’m a fine one to talk. I’ve been known to polish off a bottle of wine when I was supposed to have been tasting it.
That happened in Hohenlohe once on a junket with Limerick County Council, and the astonished vineyard proprietor nearly had to replenish his stock.

But now I’m worried about the health of the nation as well as our reputation in the eyes of the world. The very least we could do is to stop wallowing in it.