Gone to America

I didn’t make it to the parade this year, either. Unlike last year, it wasn’t snowing. It was a nice day. I just didn’t find the idea that attractive. People walking.

And it was far away, all the way up 5th Avenue at 44th Street. I started the day down at Houston, at the R* offices. I just had a couple of hours work to do to finish something I had started the day before (work continues intermittently). I left there about 12:30, and headed to the Scratcher. I bought my camera with me, with every intention of creating some kind of rudimentary photo essay, but in fact I only took three photographs, and only two of them came out. This is the first one:

It’s of Anita in the Scratcher, just after she poured me my first pint of the day at about 1pm. I had half arranged to meet up with Helen McMahon and her New-York-resident friends Anne Marie and Ciara around lunch time or in the early afternoon, but they got bogged down in Queens doing women’s things so I just hung around the Scratcher chatting to Anita and various other people who wandered in and out.

Some were Scratcher regulars who I’d met before, like Laurent. It was his birthday. In France this had not been an issue, but since he’s moved to the US it has apparently tended to become a little lost. Another guy I ended up talking to for a while – indeed, having lunch with – was a random stranger called Matt. He’s hosts a TV show on the Discovery channel, which means it could well be poised to become the new American Chopper. He didn’t try and steal anything from me.

After a while Helen and her friends settled in a bar called Vertigo which Ciara designed up around 26th Street, so I staggered up to join them. I had a pint or two more there, but they were expensive ($7!) and the music was too loud (I’m getting old). Julian, Lisa and Anne showed up. The Irish girls headed to Lunasa. I vowed to join them later, and headed with Anne, Lisa and Julian to a new bar on 28th Street and Madison called Boston 212. It was during this short walk that I took the second of the day’s pictures.

The Empire State Building, all lit up green. Julian actually has a better picture of it at his site. In my defense, Julian had taken his earlier and wasn’t nearly as drunk as me.

This was the first night that Boston 212 had opened its doors and it wasn’t quite finished, although extremely presentable. The grand opening will be on April 1st. It’s part owned by a friend of Conor’s called Charley, hence the invite. This is pretty much where I finished off the evening. I hit the wall about midnight and just had to go home. Only eleven hours of drinking! It’s official – I’m not as young as I used to be.

The whole Paddy’s Day thing is interesting. When in Ireland, I don’t really celebrate it much. As a kid I used to be taken to the parade, but nowadays it just starts too early. It’s a day off, which is nice, but the following day isn’t so there’s no real incentive to drink much. I’ve really found that the most fun to be had in Dublin on Paddy’s Day is in hanging out with Americans, to whom it really means something. This year I decided to embrace the stereotype and spend the day drinking, but it was really just an excuse. I just haven’t done that for a while.

It seems to be much more signifigant to the diaspora. The first Paddy’s Day parades weren’t in Ireland at all, they were in the US. They served a very specific purpose. They said to the community at large “We’re here, and there are a lot of us”. By comparison the festival they recently started having in Dublin doesn’t have any such history, or message – it’s really a tourist thing.

As a young(ish) freshly arrived immigrant I really don’t feel that the parade as it exists in NYC really has anything to do with me. I actually feel the opposite – turned off, excluded. Old men marching sternly. It’s not a celebration, it’s a warning. It’s not about the Irish, it’s about the Irish-Americans – an ambivalent relationship to say the least.

Any Irish person who’s travelled at all, and even most of those who haven’t, will be familiar with the surreal experience of meeting people who claim to be Irish and clearly aren’t. Usually, they’re American. At first it can be a little disorientating, and a little irritating. But they usually buy drinks for Irish people, so that’s ok. Then you can start to feel a little superior, and wish to set them straight. “No, you’re not Irish”, you say. “You’re American. I’m Irish.”

This can actually get to be quite heated, particularly with all the free (to you) drinks. Passports are brandished, accents compared, histories related. In one extreme case in Paris in 1997 I actually saw one young American reduced to tears by an Irish girl who refused in the strongest possible terms to acknowledge any validity at all to his claims at an Irish identity. This was about 4am, mind you. I spent quite a while comforting him. Something he said to me then really pointed up the difference between Irish and Irish-American.

One of the ways this guy asserted his Irish identity was by financially supporting the “armed struggle” in the North. He assumed that this established his bona fides, and would endear him to any Irish person. This attitude is no longer the norm from what I can see, but it goes a long way to explaining why Irish people can sometimes feel a little bit resentful and embarrassed by the way we are claimed and represented by Irish-Americans, specifically those who have never been to Ireland. There’s an image they seem to have which really isn’t current, if it ever was. This is also part of the reason for the feeling of exclusion I and other young(-ish) Irish immigrants feel from the parade. It’s celebrating a very different, unfamiliar kind of Irishness. It hasn’t been Irishness as we understand it for a long time. It’s Irish-Americanness.

But that’s ok. Frankly, we owe the diaspora more than they owe us. Paddy’s Day is celebrated all over the world. Pretty much anywhere you go as an Irish person you can find an Irish bar and a welcome based on your accent. As was pointed out to me on Thursday, there’s one day a year when the most powerful man in the world, the US President, has to meet the Taoiseach, leader of a country with a population half that of Manhattan.

This is not because we are so inherently great. This is because so many left, and organised, and started having parades to show that they were here, and that there were a lot of them. I still don’t really have any desire to go see the parade, but it doesn’t matter – it’s really not for me.