It’s that time of year again when all over the world there will be people dying everything they can get their hands on green. Others will be decorating anything that moves with a shamrock, while various statues and national monuments abroad will be lit brightly in a Halloween-ish hue. We, in the real Ireland, shall look on with great amusement and for our own efforts the business community will wash their vans and trucks, chuck a bit of bunting at them and drive them through the obligatory, usually wet, St Patrick’s Day parades in towns and villages all over the country. Why is it that people abroad ‘do’ our national day so much better than ourselves; it is a true paradox. They take it so much more seriously. They seem to respect it and celebrate it with a degree of enthusiasm that we just can’t seem to muster. It is nothing short of a phenomenon – there is no other little country in the world that gets such global recognition for its patron saint.
