póg mo thóin

The steadily growing gangs of yobs clustering outside the bars along Newport Avenue, dressed in cartoonishly-oversized tweed caps, bedecked in neon-green sports jerseys, and clutching twelve-packs of canned Guinness, tells me it's once again Saint Patrick's Day, in which the frat boys of America celebrate an ancient, noble and mysterious culture by pounding down pints of green-tinted Coors. A repressed and wind-swept island, and one that gave us such gifts to the world as W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, the bodhrán, Van Morrison, colcannon, The Book of Kells, Samuel Beckett, cashel blue, Gulliver's Travels, The Ulster Cycle, the Easter Rising, James Joyce and, yes, ok, Guinness and whiskey, is reduced to - well, Guinness and whiskey. And pools of vomit. My admiration for Arthur Guinness' 18th century dry stout, fondness for the whiskey that flows from the oldest official distillery in the world (Old Bushmills, 1608), and moderate interest in Bailey's Irish Cream isn't enough to convince me that Irish culture deserves to be celebrated primarily through the ordering of Irish car-bombs at local sports bars. No other ethnic culture that I can think of gets such an inappropriate and offensive celebration for its allotted holiday.

So if you admire the Gaelic peoples and wish to raise some kind of toast to their heritage that doesn't involve demeaning 6 million people as inebriated sots, why not try a plate of colcannon, a Seamus Heaney poem, a spin of Astral Weeks. I'm whipping together a dinner of Dublin Coddle and Whiskey-Glazed Carrots myself. And for anybody who suspects I'm being too much of a curmudgeonly old sobersides about this whole thing - well, let me quote one of my favorite Irish poets, Shane MacGowan(and an actual alcoholic at that!): póg mo thóin!