It doesn’t matter if you’re Irish; it seems the whole world gets in on St. Patrick’s Day. But what’s it like to drink green beer from the source?
Dublin on St. Patty’s is a green-bedecked crush of people filtering through neoclassical streets, wearing bouncy Leprechaun hats, cheap football scarves and plastic shamrock bling. The colorful accents and rapid-fire languages were proof that I was not the only foreigner picking my way down O’Connell Street, riding the electric wave of insanity into which the city had slipped. Barricades guarded by police in bright yellow sleeves kept the tipsy cattle moving; the columns of the old Georgian buildings were cast in emerald green from well-placed spotlights; and memorial fountains overflowed with foam. A chalk sign in front of a restaurant read “Soup of the Day: Whiskey.”
I had to crane my neck to see the revelers who had grappled their way up the imposing, angel-flanked statue of a long-dead nationalist leader. The memorial is still scarred with bullet holes following the Easter Rising of 1916, when Irish republicans, fighting for independence from the United Kingdom, were decisively routed by the Brits. When I arrived in the city days before St. Patty’s, one of the first things I asked my cab driver was why there were yellow flowers sprouting from the iron figures. “Ah, dumb kids,” was his response, and he explained to me that students routinely pack those old wounds with fresh flowers. The morning of St. Patty’s, as the entire city wandered from the extravagant parade, which had bafflingly included the Owasso High School band amid a giant, green Celtic Tiger float and rolling Viking warships. It was hard to see the yellow flowers past the climbing, grinning faces posing together and snapping the moment with outstretched phone-arms.
But the world is microscopic, and that Tulsa-area band wasn’t the only thing from Oklahoma that greeted me on the Emerald Isle. I ran into two friends from college at the parade, and their crew joined my crew to make seven. One of them, a teacher, tried to take a photo for her students with an old man in a Disneyland-style leprechaun costume. Two teenage girls with rub-on shamrock facial tattoos elbowed into the photo, and, while I thought it was hilarious, the leprechaun ripped off his giant felt mask and angrily shoved the girls away. Near a large building, which I discovered was a bank, the mood got dark. Police officers had formed a human wall around the structure, and throughout the area, young kids — some of them maybe 12 — were walking and leaning on each other, sobbing. I wondered what had occurred, but then I realized nothing had happened to these kids except themselves. They’d shown up chasing grown-up fun and wound up piss-drunk and miserable before lunchtime.
After we crossed the River Liffey to the southern half of the city, all of the people-clogged roads became sludgy streams feeding into Temple Bar. This frothy well of Guinness and Jameson (pronounced “Gemison” in Ireland) is Dublin’s cultural quarter and primary nightlife hub. There, I squinted at a 13-year-old as he passed by, blatantly smoking a cigarette like some rough-faced adolescent in an old-timey photo. On Crown Alley, two street performers — dressed as Mario and Luigi because hell yeah — played a keyboard and a bassoon under a brick arch. Tiny children rode on parents’ shoulders, and Baha’i monks beat drums and twirled stringed ornaments in the street. Roaring barbecue grills offered up charcoaled smells of home and the Fourth of July. Traditional Irish (“trad”) music and Katy Perry were everywhere.
In the pubs, personal space was a fairy tale. Standing with one hand at your side and the other clutching a pint closely to your chest was a fine way to go about it. Despite the overpopulation, the whole scene that weekend was uniformly genial; everyone was kind and ready to trade life stories. Helen, from Luxembourg, and I discussed xenophobia and trust in relationships (not related) for a solid hour. She smiled with drunken dimples and wobbled quite a bit, but she had a lot to say. At lunch, a falling-down-wasted college dude with a tie-on orange beard taught me about the “Irish goodbye” by getting up from the table and never coming back. Everyone seemed educated, well-traveled and kind of post-Catholic, but they didn’t really want to talk about that last one.
