Hot on the heels of rebranding Christmas festivities in Dublin as “winter holidays” and co-opting St Brigid’s day on behalf of a mythical Celtic goddess, Dublin City Council, along with the Irish Government, launched its St Patrick’s Day festival with a distinct absence of green, Irish heritage and any connection with its religious roots.
The festival organisers, St Patrick’s Festival, a registered charity in Ireland, announced that this year the festival, which will run from 16th to 19th March, is taking on the theme of “Mar a Chéile Sinn” (We Are One), with organisers extending an open invitation to people from all over the world to come to Dublin to celebrate the day in unison.
Arts minister and Green Party member of parliament Catherin Martin announced: “The theme ‘We Are One’ is about inclusivity and there’s no better time than St Patrick’s Day to have that welcoming message, that cead míle fáilte [a hundred thousand welcomes], that we are one as a people and to celebrate diversity too.”
While many commend the festival launch as a brilliant marketing trick for having created some mild controversy – because no publicity is bad publicity – others were both angered and perturbed by the approach taken for the festival.
Irish senator, Sharon Keoghan, described images promoting the festival launch as “fetishistic” and “bit heavy-handed with the progressivism”.
She expanded: “I spotted two cowboys, some girls in an odd sort of beetle costume like something out of a Marvel movie and, of course, the ever-present men in women’s faces, who apparently must be included in every public display lest the government risk the ire of terminally online woke Twitter addicts.”
What particularly invoked the ire of many at the photo-launch of the festival on the grounds of the government buildings was the presence in the same photo of a man dressed in women’s clothes with lace tights.
Speaking in the Senate, Keoghan raised the issue quite bluntly:
“It was more than a questionable decision, many feel, to place a young girl of about eight years of age three feet away from a man’s crotch bulging out of tiny lace tights and underwear, and to take photos showing that, and then say, ‘Yip, that is what we want to represent Ireland internationally’, and run with it.”
While the other members of the Senate present were not animated by the issue, Keoghan raises a number of important points. The first and most obvious is the appropriateness of the photo itself, bringing a child into close proximity in the manner described.
The second issue is the ubiquity of “progressive” imagery across the public square, capturing every aspect of society in a manner unrepresentative of general society and to the general diminution of representation of other groups.
The festival, explicitly focusing on inclusion of all, to the exclusion of its origins and heritage, represents another attempt by Dublin City Council to distance public and cultural events from their religious heritage. Focusing on a theme of radical inclusion, the festival’s organisers, along with its funders and supporters, have succeeded in placing themes with no connection to St Patrick or Irishness itself, to the fore.
Brian Merriman, founder of the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, told Newstalk Breakfast the festival and the day are separate things. He believes the concerns are unfounded and ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ interpretation of the issue. I am unclear what that means exactly but clearly pointing towards something negative and regressive.
“We will have leprechauns that don’t exist …I know there was weird beasts and horned headdresses in it – but sure Celtic myths and legends are full of that… We’re not ditching anything, we’re just including more.”
For many, what is not being ditched, but pushed to the margins, are the religious origins of the saint himself– only the gaudy, green-washed depictions of the saint and the American-influenced green beer will remain as testament to the real-live man who established Christianity in Ireland; the child who was born in Britain but sold into slavery across the Irish sea, held in servitude for six years, escaped out of Ireland, and returned years later to establish the Church in Ireland.
St Patrick, despite Merriman’s dismissal, is a real, historical figure, hugely influential, and until very, very recently, more than just the caricature cited above. While Christians are becoming a minority in Ireland, it seems that it won’t be until that minority status is crystallised that its traditions will be afforded protection from the cultural assimilation by a rapidly secularised country.
The radical inclusivity found in the St Patrick’s festival applies only to certain groups and were it applied equally to all in all events, then every event would be a smorgasbord melange of everything and nothing all at once, with the distinctive identity, heritage and culture of all wiped out in favour of a homogeneous faux-heterogeneity.
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