George Patrick Bush: making Ulster into forn frendsa freem

I can't tell you all how relieved I am that March 18th has come again and all the kerfuffle that surrounds St.Patricks Day is over for another year.

My family call me "The Grinch" because of my cynical attitude to Christmas because of my cynical attitude to that festival so it's probably just as well that I generally avoid them on Paddy's Day as I have no time for this particular excuse for a piss-up.

I generally avoid the Cork parade though I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of this as living in a city it's impossible to avoid the festival altogether and if you don't go to the parade your memories are more likely to consist of litter, vomit, broken glass, poor singing and fights.

And kids overeating. Funnily enough the Irish Times did an editorial yesterday about childhood obesity. Maybe it's time to bring Patrick back so he can drive all the snacks from Ireland. he did a really good with the snakes. Then again, there's so much underhand activity going on in the property and banking sectors that maybe he should drive all the sneaks out of Ireland, though this might reduce our international competitiveness particularly when the Chinese economy is growing so fast.

But then, I've only ever thought about celebrating the festival when I'm out of the country and I suddenly get nostalgic for it. When I'm here, I realise what a cold, grey, miserable country it is at this time of year. Lots of other people have cottoned onto this essential truth; one American visitor expressed dissapointment at the paucity of the St.Patrick's Day parade in Cork but the whole point is to celebrate a country that exists only in our minds.

A few years ago my brother flew to Boston at this time of year and got really drunk every night and sang songs about how much he missed Ireland. To me that's the essence of Paddy's day.

John O Farrell wrote a piece yesterday about how sad it is that the British have no feast day of their own and have to approriate ours. He's not exactly wrong, yet what does it say about us that we celebrate as our national hero a Welshman who introduced a primitive form of a Western version of a middle Eastern religion to our country leading to the marginalisation of our own indiginous religions as our national feast?

I'm not going to able to settle the debate about whether Patrick arriving on our isle was a good thing or a bad thing. There are those who argue that if he hadn't, then monks on places like Skeelig Island would never have been able to preserve classical texts and thereby save Western Civilisation from barbarians like the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, when we converted to Christianity we gradually lost a connection to the Earth that we've never regained except and only value as a commodity to sell to tourists.

And, needless to mention, the conflcit in the North is all about different Christian sects fighting each other, though it would be naive to imagine that Celtic Tribes always got on with each other.

The odd thing is that both sides in the North lay claim to the legacy of St. Patrick, of whom Ian Paisley has a big painting on his wall. Paisley and others claim that Patrick represents a tradition of Celtic Christianity that was lost when St Augustine came to the British Isles and Didn't come back until Henry XIII wanted to chop his wives head's off and steal all the Church's property. I suppose it makes sense to him.

That the history of relgious conflict is a compicated one with subtle nuances that only insiders and scholars can really understand has never stopped George W Bush from sticking his stupid nose into religous conflicts and this is no exception.

I must say, though, it was nice of him to find time in his busy schedule to commiserate with the family of Robert McCartney, particularly when he hasn't attended a single memorial service for any of the thousand or so men and women who he's sent to die in Iraq, not to mention the 10,000 or so people who die of violent crime in the US every year.

W has pledged to do everything he can to bring the men who killed McCartney to justice, which worries me a little as he has no more respect for the norms of international engagement than the IRA do for the rule of law, and his approach to terrorism has been generally to bomb the crap out of places in the general area where terrorists might be suspected to be. He's also gone on record as saying that the IRA were wrong to offer to kill the killers of McCartney when he asked for the head of Bin Laden dead or alive a few years ago and hasn't rescinded as far as I know. Like the IRA, he doesn't think the normal rules apply to him.

Yet his sympathies are with the unionists, which isn't all that surprising as he's spent most of his life in West Texas with people of protestant Scotch-Irish stock. These are the same people who would die for the right to bear arms, yet he doesn't feel at all uncomfortable asking for the gun to be taken out of Irish politics.

It's all a part of a familiar strategy by the Republicans of demonising everywhere else in the world and ignoring the myriad faults of their own society.

Sadly, it seems to work for him, and he doesn't even need a Shamrock to explain how bad non-America is to his slow-witted supporters.