What St. Patrick means to me….

It has been a hazy, green week for a lot of people around the globe. Sore heads mix with sunshine. Pints of the black stuff copulate with swift and nifty chasers in pubs and bars from east to west. Giant leprechauns dance with shrieking lassies of Celtic delight. Gentle and not so gentlemen rediscover their love of what I like to call “Speedy Ostrich Yahoo Dancing”. This is when the male manages to extricate himself from the three deep bar, holding three pints of Guinness and three tumblers of Jameson whiskey balanced precariously on top – his upper torso remains rigid and balanced to prevent the alcohol from spilling, while from the waist down there is a rapid rhythm and flailing of legs which mimics the beats of the Bodhrán and fiddle pounding around room – his face is a blend of concentration, raspberry tongue and winks, as he nods and shouts back to his mates in the corner.

I have long held a view that to celebrate St. Patricks day is not as simple as being proud to be Irish. It is not as black and white, or indeed green and gold, as “Be gorrah sure it’s our day to celebrate, let’s get ourselves blind drunk in the process”. There are very complex understandings being understood when you spend the 17^th March and the few days either side, as drunk as monkey on the wagon. I want to break these things down a little and try to know what is really driving the yearly soiree into oblivion – For there are powers at work which have been in situ for eons. They are industrious while we sleep and they never take their foot off the pedal.

Let me begin with the last decade or so in Ireland. We have seen untold atrocities which have been perpetrated against young children in schools, convents and churches be revealed. Thousands of lives have been destroyed by the hands, mouths and cocks of paedophilic priests in the land of the Saint and Scholar. The establishment has hidden the truth for as long as it could possibly do so, much in the same way as thousands of home owners were misinformed by banks who knew the industry was about to collapse in the late noughties. The people in power at the top are corrupt and self serving. The high Priest (or Pope as he likes to call himself) and his cronies were aware that kids were being raped and assaulted and failed to act. When you celebrate the day of St. Patrick, you do subliminally accept the status of the Church as a prominent voice in Ireland.   

These are the same people as this acclaimed saint Patrick. He came here in the fifth century and when he arrived with his staff and his Catholicism, he plundered our land of its traditional Celtic beliefs. He took the ancient systems of learning and culture we had, inverted them and bullied us into a new system which had nothing to do with God or belief.  This new Catholic Christian system was and still is a means to control masses of people. It is a means to subordinate and strike fear into the common man. The rumour is that St. Patrick rid the land of snakes which had plagued our Island territory. While some people simply read this literally, the real meaning is in the metaphorical repatriation of power from a female dominated society, to the secular confines of male dominated Christianity. Ancient Ireland was a land with strong powerful women who ruled. Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is a means of reaffirming our belief that this new system is a better way – better than one which had served for thousands of years previously.

In his song “The Colony”, Irish singer Damien Dempsey sings about the homogenising of cultures all over the world at the hands of murderous and imposing foreign, religious powers.

“With bible in one hand and a sword in the other
They came to purify my land of my Gaelic Irish mothers
And fathers, and sisters and brothers
With our own ancient customs, laws, music, art
Way of life and culture
Tribal in structure
We had a civilisation

When they were still Neanderthal nation”

In Irish terms this began with St. Patrick. In global terms this is an ongoing fundamental tenet of Christianity. The Crusades existed to spread the word of God by subjugating all those who conformed, and killing those who didn’t. The war to control is raging every day. You see it on your TV screens in between X factor and the sports highlights. It is portrayed as a war on terror. It is portrayed as a justifiable “Good” war, by the ironically named “Defence” ministers. Although the merging of various leaders at the top of the tree and their ability to control the media has somewhat dulled the ability to know who exactly is pulling the strings, make no mistake that USA represents Christianity. They are bludgeoning their way to control religions, oil reserves, currency and the minds of the peoples. In a small way when you celebrate with your fifteen pints of Guinness or Bulmers, you accept this as a truth and position yourself behind this wheel.

The patriots who fought and died for a free Ireland are now just icons from a fallen past. We are so far from the truth and freedom which these men and women tried to obtain that it is almost easier to just go with the new world, than it is to fight and return to a different, simpler time. I am very proud to be Irish, and I love my country dearly. But those of you that think that celebrating St. Patricks day is nothing more than parades and craic and pints and dancing are very well misguided. This is what they want you to think. Think about it for yourself. Yeats put it better than any man else in the opening verse of his poem “September 1913.”

“What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone?

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave”

There is a whole world out there we rarely want to think about. It’s much easier to just go with the flow.