Corned Beef?

I’m still a little bemused by American celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day, which seem to be a bigger deal than in the country that is actually having the feast day. Maybe it’s because almost none of it seems to recollect any of my experience of Ireland. In my thirty years of living amongst a family with a huge Irish background, with visits across the sea, I have never, never heard of or had corned beef and cabbage. Not once. It seems to be a uniquely Irish-American thing.

And I don’t think they can understand the Irelands I lived with growing up. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I understand, considering how silly some of it was.

I lived in a country that decided that certain political parties were so dangerous that we weren’t allowed to hear their voices. Where songs were banned if they suggested that the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were innocent (which turned out to be true). Where my mother left Harrods before it blew up in ‘83, and present at two bombings in Bangor. I walked past the crater from the biggest bomb exploded on the mainland almost every day for three years. I went to weddings that could feed the five thousand and make the Sermon On The Mount look like an amateur operation (did Jesus even provide butter? I don’t think so). I got in trouble at school for both students and teachers for reading a biography of Michael Collins. Jackie Charlton and Tony Cascarino, circa ‘94. And getting all the jokes in Father Ted.

A country divided, where even the name of a city is a point of argument and identification. But things are better now; the guns are buried and growing moss. The Maze, once part of the language of my childhood (why did I know about ‘H-blocks’ from such an early age? Did I really watch the news that much?) lies in ruins, Manchester took the Government money and ran, transforming its aging city centre into a 21st century arrangement of glass and metal. Stormont lives once more, and Ireland are determined never to win the Eurovision Song Contest ever again…