Over recent years, St Patrick’s Day in Dublin and around Ireland has been transformed from a relatively domestic affair; a celebration of provinciality, into a week-long ‘festival’ celebrating globalized Irish culture and the new economy. Irish-American visitors were dismayed to witness a parade filled with Polish, Chinese and even African faces and a distinct lack of the ‘tura-lura-la’, green waist-coated blarney that they have had served to them on previous visits. They say that we are ‘losing our identity’. I’m constantly amused by traditionalists and reactionaries who seem to be unaware that the main threat to the values they hold so dear; national identity (Hitler would have said ‘purity’), traditional gender roles and the family, has been the free-market. They want everything bought, trafficked about and sold, complaining all the while that we’re a society filled with cross-breeds, tarts and atheists.
The new centerpiece of the Patrick’s Day festival is that modern corporate necessity; the firework display. I have nothing against fire-works, in fact I love them and deeply mistrust anyone who doesn’t care for them, regarding them as soulless robot people. It’s just a pity that fireworks have just been implanted as a necessity of any large scale celebration. You get them at Chinese New Year, Independence Day, Halloween, Bonfire Night and virtually any time a city wants to say ‘Look at us; aren’t we great?’ Large displays are beyond the budget of even city corporations, so they are largely funded corporately. The display in Dublin was called ‘Skyfest’ and was located downtown, in the financial district; with pyro-technicians doing what they do from a flotilla of pontoons moored in the River Liffey.
This year, the weather intervened and the parade didn’t get so much rained on as inundated, blasted and blown over the horizon. Storm-force winds and lashing sleet made any outdoor congregation, let alone firework display, impossible. I don’t feel any mean pleasure in this but it is interesting to consider that the fireworks, which are in no way traditional or Irish, were thwarted by bad weather, which is more Irish than anything else bar alcoholism.
For the purpose of combating violent drunkenness, the police this year introduced what they are fond of calling ‘new initiatives’. The remarkable thing about these new initiatives is how very old they are, consisting of simple lock-downs on liquor stores (‘offies’ or off-licences) until late in the afternoon of the 17th, and confiscation of cans, bottles etcetera from reeling, puking members of the public. We have a new Garda commissioner, a new broom who is supposed to be sweeping the Irish police into the next millennium. The new broom is a highly-qualified woman from Boston who trying to put into action those ‘new initiatives’ that made the Irish-Americans so successful in the police-departments all along the east coast. Simultaneously, gun-crime is starting to appear. It won’t be long before we have armed response units thundering down O’Connell Street bristling with semi-automatic weapons and gun turrets in Phoenix Park.
But the booze is a real problem. I hear stories of drunken display that would make your liver ache. I don’t see many of them myself (I avoid the hot-spots) but they sound like that truly insane, blindingly excessive drunkenness that you get in people who are hopeless, colonized and emotionally damaged. How, why do they do it? These are young men who regard as normal the consumption of six pints of lager and three shots BEFORE the go out to the pub. No wonder they’re waving their underpants in the air at an intersection by one o’ clock in the morning. Jealous teenage girls beating the sawdust out of each other at taxi-ranks fir some perceived slight or encroachment. I didn’t believe my students’ stories until they backed them up with footage shot on mobile phones.
It may be cocaine, which is quite widely used in Dublin and which allows people to reach previously impossible depths of howling drunkenness; this might account for the psychotic behavior. Most drugs sell very well in Dublin; we used to neck huge quantities of ecstasy in the 90’s. The Irish are precocious in depravity; a lot goes on ‘on the sly’ at which nice people who read The Irish Times would blanch. Organised group sex and wife-swapping is so prevalent in County Wicklow that sermons have been handed down from the ineffectual pulpits of local churches in a effort to stop it.
Sixty percent of the marijuana smoked in Britain is now home-grown. Much of that is the more powerful skunk that contains 25 times the amount of active agent found in traditional grass. This is the stuff that makes it almost impossible to finish watching a film. The liberal Independent newspaper published a full-page apology for their previously-held stance on drug liberalization, asserting that the new skunk is closer in effect to acid, heroin or cocaine than to regular pot. Cases of mental illness are sky-rocketing in both Britain and Ireland, much of it exacerbated by alcoholism or drug-dependence.

I always said the same thing as the boys on South Park: the worst thing about pot is that it makes you happy being bored; you get nothing done and like it. The same thing has been said about alcohol in a favourite television script of mine; "When you're drunk, you're never bored, did you know that? You may bore other people but the moments slip by in such a satisfactory manner..."
The new skunk seems more malevolent; "...like being smashed over the head by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick." I was sceptical when my father told the story of a student who was shown a ward at a prominent Dublin mental-health centre filled with basket-cases and told that they were all marijuana casualties. A whiff of Reefer Madness perhaps? But I guess now that more powerful drugs, taken in hard combination with each other, are responsible for the horrible excesses and mental breakdowns.

Foreigners think that we're freaks, though I think that the British have long since caught up with us. Why do we both plunge into intoxication with such abandon? Recent genetic studies suggest that we and the Brits share a largely common genetic heritage, with Celtic, Norman, Dutch overlaying a basic commonality. And we do get pissed. Horribly and often.

Things are slowing down, or so it seems to me. A few years ago, when the first real money started appearing in Dublin; people seemed to be out drinking every night of the week. The corporate bonding strategy at most companies consisted of two words; FREE BOOZE. Tuesday was indistinguishable from Saturday. The cost of living may have had something to do with it; more and more people are drinking at home; wine sales in particular have soared. Guinness has experienced a serious slump. The end of the Irish pub? They said that when the smoking ban arrived. Then the clamp-down on rural drink driving. The conversion of the Dublin pub into the Ikea bar. Maybe people are just more committed to their jobs or maybe we all just made some mass subconscious choice. For whatever reason, things are slowing down.

This has to be a good thing in the long. Hospitals are already half-crippled by alcohol-related injuries and it's only going to get worse as baby-boomers age and we see increases in obesity and related health-issues. The danger of course is that health, which is driven by income and personal satisfaction, will become the possession of the wealthy. Ill-health, which is often underpinned by poverty and low-self-esteem, will become the possession of the poor. When you allow physical health to be defined by social class, it's not long before the rich start to see the poor as a subspecies to be despised and abandoned. This has happened, with the added toxin of race, in the United States. There are many wealthy people who blame people who can't afford to cook for eating fast food. Miserable people will become reliant on alcohol and other drugs. They will become obese and listless. It's dangerous to blame the poor for their ills; too much contempt builds up. Then Hurricane Katrina comes along and an entire city full of people gets left to drown.

There's definitely something wrong with the combination of a welfare state with an economy that runs largely on overconsumption. Greed and materialism, combined with the support of the government, leads to the creation of an idle, listless underclass. The problem is that right-wing governments seem intent on removing the support-structure, whilst leaving the greed and materialism intact. The rich get richer, more self-satisfied, more cruel. The poor languish. The ideal of a wholly middle-class society is a pipe dream; economic propaganda. You need healthy skilled manual labourers to support a healthy society.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied."