St Patrick's Day controversies - 20 March 1998

Anyone who does not have a sneaking desire to be trampled underfoot ought never to go into mid-town Manhattan on 17 March.

You'd think, that after 60 years' experience of this city, this prohibition would have occurred to me the moment I woke up last Tuesday. But a month or so ago I made a date with a very pretty young woman I've known now for a dozen years or more, small with tiny, deft and graceful hands, all the better to fiddle around in your mouth and perform expertly the hygienist's quarterly chore of teeth cleaning.

My admiration for this young lady is such that it overwhelmed my memories of St Patrick's Day. On that day, more than any other, what you might call the transportation geography of the island is transformed. The parade starts at 11 in the morning, beside the stone lions atop the steps of the public library, at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and, for the next Lord knows how many hours, it stomps and blasts and tootles and whirls its way two miles north up to 86th Street, then wheels sharp right, crosses town, over to the East River. All traffic on Fifth Avenue is, of course, forbidden and there's a whole system of no-entry prohibitions on other streets and avenues.

At what an old American friend of mine calls half-gone noon, I pattered out of my apartment house and turned right, to pick up a cab going downtown on Fifth. Then I noticed two or three policemen strolling and slapping their gloves.

Odd, must mean the president was in town. He upsets the entire traffic system and human locomotion more than anybody. He comes to town about once every two months, to raise money for the next Democratic campaign and I've often thought it would be a kindly act if he'd contribute the takings to the two to three million dollars it costs the city to receive and protect him.

Well I came to and I knew once for all where and when I was, when one of the strolling cops held up an arm and cried, hold it grandpa. It used to be, hold it sonny, but that must have been some time ago.

I turned back and went across town to Park Avenue and started off on the long haul down to 62nd Street. Of

course, at an intersection ten blocks down, 86th Street, which is a wide, two-way street and therefore made for parades, there was an abrupt halt for old codgers carrying green banners and drum majorettes in emerald silk tights and squads of police with green-dyed flowers and blaring bands and city officials with green ties and the old former mayor, huge Ed Koch, in a blinding green sweater, striding along, shouting "Hey fellas, how you doing?" A variation on his clockwork greeting when he was in office, "Hey, how'm I doing?"

Well once I was in the blessed sanctuary of the dentist's chair, I thought it would not be difficult afterwards to go downtown to my favourite lunch counter, where usually at 2.30, a half-gone two, there are no more than 20, 30 customers at most. By the time I fought my way into the place, there were, conservatively, 20,000 elbowing, pushing, people in green costumes varying from the cute to the grotesque. I fought my way out again and, not to have you go on sharing the screaming boredom of it all, I eventually got home.

I suppose I must have done a dozen or more talks in the past about St Patrick's Day and the Irish in America and only rarely, if ever, had a second thought about the delicacy of a commentator of English origins opening his mouth in this city on a subject that is never less than inflammatory.

It is not wise, I discovered years ago, for an Englishman to stop by one of the Irish pubs on the East Side, on the evening of St Patrick's Day. But, by day, and from long practice, the more contentious paraders, various protest groups, "Brits get out of our country", "Free the colony" and the like, they're now taken for granted and the whole motley regiments of marchers seem to dampen the fire of their particular crusade with a gusher of good nature.

It was left to the odd old bystander to recall the threat of rebellion in an era long ago, when the St Patrick's Day parade was practically a communal protest against the ferocious discrimination that met Irish immigrants from the day they arrived. Even as late as the early 1930s, you could pass shops and small businesses advertising positions vacant, alongside a fading old sign in block letters, "No Irish need apply".

Last Tuesday, the only boos reported along the route were for the Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who never wiped out his toothy grin even when bands of no more than three or four young people shouted "Homophobe". This buzzword refers back to one crusade, six years ago, that failed.

For the first time, a newly-organised group, the Irish Gay and Lesbian Organisation, applied to the parade committee which is made up of American-Irish businessmen, politicians, a cleric or two, to march with, to coin a word, the mainstream. The committee refused them and therefore the mayor and the police were called on to refuse them a licence.

They threatened everything short of mayhem and assembled in time for the official start but they were confined by a whole line of, as luck happened, cheerful cops, and their protest, demonstration, melted away in considerable ill-feeling and every year since then, they've started their own parade two hours before the accredited one and have straggled uptown, not very far, before a more or less listless audience, aroused only from time to time by a clap or a shout of, "Right on".

In a couple of other cities the gays have marched as a unit, inside the whole parade and it's been asked here in New York why the Irish Gays and Lesbians haven't gone to court to assert their right to freedom of assembly, under the Constitution, to do likewise.

They have, they did, six years ago and the courts upheld the parade committee's ban on the simple fundamental ground that the St Patrick's Day parade, though it uses city property – namely the streets, by permission of the city council – the parade committee is not a public group using public funds, but a private club and therefore can take in or keep out anybody it wants.

The larger question, which I hinted earlier, is something an Englishman doesn't care to bring up before American friends too often, especially of Irish extraction, is the status of Northern Ireland and the efforts, as interminable as those made in the Middle East, to achieve a just and peaceable solution to a problem, that's more than 300 years old.

I have found, from surveys of public opinion, confirmed by years of personal discussion, that very few

Americans, and I'm thinking of otherwise educated Americans, have really taken in the political fact that Northern Ireland – Ulster is unknown by such in these parts – is part of the United Kingdom with its representatives in Westminster.

Sadder still is the prevalent notion that Northern Ireland is an occupied country, occupied by a foreign power. There's little awareness that the great majority of the Northern Irish want to remain in the United Kingdom

and that that is the sticking point.

But, cried one family member of mine, they can't, they're across the sea in a foreign land. They're no better off than a colony. Why don't they take a referendum then, is another challenge and, thanks to Mr Blair and his tactful American cheerleader on the side, Mr Clinton, it seems that that is a bright prospect.

I discovered long ago why it is not worth getting into a hassle over this with good friends, because if there is an all-American view or rather a prevailing American view, it springs understandably and overwhelmingly from the oft-told memories down three or four generations of the Irish.

From, you might say, the terrible historical memory of a whole race of immigrants, who came here in the first great flood of refugees from the famine of 1846, 7, 8, a catastrophe so humanly appalling as to be beyond the imagining of the Europe and the England they left behind.

The supreme original irony of the famine is that it was caused by an American export. In 1845, the most unwanted visitor to cross the Atlantic to the east was the American potato blight. Its toll began in weeks and within months it was beginning to putrefy vast harvests of the crop that, more than any other, sustained the Irish people. Three years later, three-quarters of a million dead, 20,000 having dropped in the fields from starvation.

When the young Queen Victoria heard that the country was famished, nothing in her life had prepared her to imagine a woman or child collapsing from hunger. All she heard officially was that Ireland was full of inflammable matter and, against the advice of her ministers in Ireland, she thought she might douse it with a royal visit. She did note in her diary that she'd never seen more ragged and wretched people anywhere else.

But such was the almost mystical magic that distance lent to the monarch, that she was received in her open carriage everywhere by cheering crowds and the greatest enthusiasm, especially in Cork, where thousands of starving farmers had retreated from their barren land, either to join sedition societies or take one of Mr Cunard's new steamships to Boston. I've often thought that one of those ragged people and desperate to get to America was a famished farmer, Patrick Kennedy, great-grandfather, as it happened, of the 35th President of the United States.

In the late 1840s and early '50s then, just under one-quarter of the whole fainting population of Ireland, most of them Catholics from the south, one and three-quarter millions of them, left for America, mostly for New York and Boston. Their view of things, inevitably, is rooted in that distant, but ever-vivid past and if there's one part of Irish history that the American Irish keep forever green, it's the terrible trauma of the famine.

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