There are some things you have to do just once in your life. Typically they show up on bucket lists as the fantastic, the outlandish, the expensive, places like Las Vegas and experiences like sky diving come up often as do activities that fall on the more elicit end of the spectrum. One time, when I was in a mindset more focused on opportunities never to come again, I decided that I had to, just one time, be in Dublin for Saint Patrick’s day.
I wasn’t alone in this, we composed as a group the whole of Duquesne University’s inaugural Galway foreign exchange ensemble and although none of us had seemed to grasped the concept when we landed in Ireland as a whole we saw an opportunity to do something truly memorable and grabbed onto it. Luckily we had the forethought to book hotels and planned to get in a few days of casual exploration before the big celebration, Dublin doesn’t have the best reputation among the people in the rest of the country, it is a deep seated dispute which began with Dublin having a low opinion of the island outside of its borders. Despite that I enjoy Dublin as it at least feels in some small and impossible to connect way like my home in Chicago, its width and breath, its hustle, its self important air that doesn’t care for you and thus allows you to dissolve down its back alleys and main thoroughfares are all familiar in their cold callousness.
Through the shops we poked around, amongst the architecture we took pictures, in the pubs we drank pints and had a few good days on our own little adventure, despite what people from the ‘real’ Ireland will tell you Dublin is a nice place and isn’t too big or too up its own hole to enjoy. If you’re ever in this neck of the woods feel free to have a poke around for a day or two, see a museum, relax in a park, do some touristy things because when you get to the heart of things Ireland markets itself as a nice place to come and visit. The Irish Brand is what you see on postcards, rainbows over rolling hills, livestock as part of the scenery, quaint pubs full of weathered patrons, castles, ruins, the Guinness brewery, the thousand welcomes are all things that the Irish know bring in visitors-along with their Euros-to see what all the craic is about.
Saint Patrick’s day is probably the biggest export of the Irish experience, as the day when ‘everyone’s a little Irish’ä it’s instantly recognizable as an opportunity to put on a silly hat, dust off that horrible accent you can’t do, and act the maggot with zero repercussions for your excesses. In truth, it was the New York and Boston immigrant populations that popularized the celebrations as a way to keep connected with their heritage, cut loose, and be proud of where they came from all in a massive display of ancestral spirit. So paradoxically, in Dublin, Saint Patrick’s day is when all of the foreigners come over to visit.
In the couple of days leading up to the big event things had been relatively quiet, we were young so we stayed up late, we explored the nightlife, we satisfied our taste for a different culture and all it could excite us with. All the while there was an undercurrent of something more sinister looming, the calm before the storm, the tension before the final push of a big battle. The locals and the working people all knew that the tide would start rising that morning and would not recede for many hours thereafter. Seven years ago today, we awoke to the spectacle of St. Patrick’s day in the heart of Dublin, and to this day I have never seen anything like it. There was a parade, somewhere, I am sure of it, but I was not there to witness it for between me and it was a wall of humanity which took onto itself a presence that no addition of its individual parts could account for.
Were there a million people on the streets of Dublin that day? Perhaps, easily there were more than anyone could count, could make sense of if they tried to imagine them as a single unit, we’ve all seen crowds in stadiums, at concerts and rallies, we’ve been crammed shoulder to shoulder with busloads of strangers and waited in endless lines at amusement parks but this was something altogether different. If there was anything which could earn itself a fair comparison would be a religious pilgrimage, the Hajj at Mecca as a swirling fervor of devotion and praise meets to cement their collective faith, Dublin felt that way only drunken, and unruly filled with incomprehensible people who moved as a great river waiting to sweep away all those who fell in under its pull.
There is an Irish phrase which you’ve probably never come across, it’s not terribly useful and lacks the cheeky fun of Pog mo thoin, but I like it nonetheless. Rí rá agus a ruaile buaile ( Ree-Raw Awgus a Roo-lah Boo-lah ) translates into something like a great noise and much movement although more liberal definitions of the term can mean a cacophonous catastrophe, a noise of terrible destruction, or a massively great time. Language is one of the many things that the Irish play fast and loose with, I think they do it just to mess with the foreigners. It’s how I would describe the scene in Dublin on St. Pat’s without hesitation as every vein of the city was clogged with sound and color, voices yelling and singing-though the difference was negligible- and a never ending procession of arms and legs working against one another jostling, embracing, expressing, and rollicking to the beat of some intrinsic festival drum.
Dublin on Saint Patrick’s day is a once in a lifetime experience in so far as I feel no need to go through it again, I actually have a problem with big crowds, loud noises, and sensory overload give me something like an anxiety attack and my nerves will quickly fray if I spend too long in the middle of it all. On that day I took refuge in the many cathedrals of the city which were oddly deserted on that very Catholic holiday, away from the madness my wits returned to me and my sanity was saved by the welcome respite religious sanctuary can offer. Galway isn’t like that on March 17th, sure people get drunk, there’s a parade, and we all have license to go a bit overboard, but it falls far short of madness, of chaos, of the unbridled exhibition that a big, unfeeling city can get away with once or twice a year. It’s no rí rá agus a ruaile buaile, and for that I am thankful.
