Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. Your humble blogger is currently in an exciting and undisclosed location celebrating this holiest of occasions by embracing two modern traditions that would be totally alien to both St. Patrick and a devotee of his a mere century ago.
The first is drinking. March 17th falls smack dab in the middle of Lent, and Saint Patrick certainly never touched a drop of liquor on this day during his entire life (he did drink whiskey, if Pota Phadraig is to be believed, but wouldn't have drank it during Lent). On the more modern side of the house, Ireland was legally mandated to be dry on St. Patrick's Day until after the Beatles were broken up. But I will drink, even drink green beer, not to mention a shitload of Guinness.
The second tradition is wearing orange in addition to (or even instead of) green. As astute readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm not Catholic. On top of that, not only do I support keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but I think the Republic of Ireland was a mistake in the first place and the UK should have been the totality of both isles. As a result, it's only fitting that I support the orange third of the Irish flag. (I'll probably drink a Black and Tan as well, just to be cheeky). As Pulpit and Pen puts it (profoundly):
First, Patrick wasn’t Irish. Patrick was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, where he was raised to the age of 16. Secondly, Patrick wasn’t Catholic. Patrick’s father was a deacon and his grandfather a pastor in the very early Christian Church of Britain, which had no affiliation whatsoever to the Bishop of Rome.
Put plainly, any attempt to Catholicize Patrick by the church of Rome is pure fiction, made up by the Harlot Beast herself.
In Ireland, Roman Catholics wear green. But Protestants, however, wear Orange (in honor of William of Orange, the great Protestant king). So when you go to that St. Paddy’s day celebration, wear orange and explain to people why; it’s a good opportunity to share the Gospel.
Now all this talk about green and orange and Ireland and beer and whiskey makes me think, naturally, of Corb Lund's first hit "It's Time to Switch to Whiskey (We've Been Drinking Beer All Night)†.
In the song, he covers a little bit of Irish whiskey drinking. When I was in Ireland a few years back I made sure to start up a round of this song at the bar: there were enough other Albertans around that we could make a solid go at singing it. The key lyrics are:
Well I've heard it said that you can get some heat in Irish pubsFor those of you unfamiliar, Bushmills is distilled in Northern Ireland where the Orangemen are, and Dublin is certainly not a friendly place for Irish Loyalists!
Servin' Jamesons to an Orangeman and Bushmills to his cuz
Well here's what you do with Tullamore Dew, you can meet 'em both halfway
It's time to switch to whiskey they've been drinkin' beer all day
† Regular readers may note that I am spelling "whisky" the wrong way in this post. For St. Patrick's Day, especially this one, it's only fitting to spell it "wrong".
However, this lyric bothered me more than a little bit. Having explored Ireland I learned that the song is ridiculously inaccurate...it may explain some of the weird looks they were giving me at that tavern in Dublin (not far, of course, from the Jameson Distillery). A few days later I visited (as you might) the Tullamore D.E.W. Visitor Centre, a leisurely half day drive almost due west of Dublin. The key note here is that Tullamore is smack dab in the middle of The Republic of Ireland (almost literally) but is no closer to the 13 provinces of Northern Ireland than the republican capital is. Both in a geographical sense as you can see in the map below) but also culturally.
The worst thing is that the Tullamore Dew distillery seen in the photo is a historic building dating back to...2014. The original Tullamore Dew ran from 1829 until 1954, after which production moved to County Cork in the far southest of the country and about as far from Northern Ireland as you can be without drowning. While founded by Michael Molloy, the real father of the distillery was one Daniel E. Williams. Williams was born in the Quaker (ie. Protestant) down of Mountmellick but he himself was Catholic. So we have a Catholic "greenie" making a whiskey with a green label that for the last 50 years was produced in the heart of the greenest part of Ireland...and that's "halfway"?
In fairness, Jameson was founded in Dublin but is no longer distilled there...it is instead distilled...in Cork...next door to where Tullamore Dew was made from 1954-2013. So in fairness new Tullamore is closer to halfway to Bushmills compared to the new Jameson distillery, but that only works if you listen to the song now (Corb Lund released it in 2002).
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