Trying to escape from the clutches of ‘the quare stuff’

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m of an age now where I pat myself on the back on the morning after St. Patrick’s Day if I manage to remain unscathed from the ravages of our national tomfoolery.

Even for those of us who say that we just enjoy ‘a few pints’, there’s always the temptation to let loose on our national holiday, but as years pass, the self-preservation instinct tends to prevail.

St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve always found to be good craic up until around 6pm when the slobbery stuff tends to take over from that earlier mix of good humour and philanthropy.

Nothing much has really changed over the years as I discovered when I read through last week’s excellent piece by William Henry on our national infatuation with ‘drowning the shamrock’ on the 17th day of our third month.

He recalled the first official St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Galway city in 1903 when ‘rebel leader to be’ Eamonn Ceannt wryly summed up our attachment to the ‘hard stuff’.

While Ceannt was shocked at the whole concept of ‘drowning the shamrock’ (a nice way of saying getting ‘absolutely ‘lutered’), he still felt that getting drunk on Patrick’s Day was ‘almost mandatory for Irish people even for those who didn’t drink regularly’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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