It's Easy Being Green
Top of the morning to my fellow Irishmen (the mammy was from Dublin, so I claim green blood), and to my fellow Patricks (the confirmation name is a wonderful invention).
And how should we celebrate the day that's in it? In an Irish pub getting stocious on Guinness and singing about the Four Green Fields? Not if Eamonn Forde has his way:
"To walk into one of these pubs - and there is not a single pub in Ireland remotely like them - is to walk into an Ireland that only exists in the threadbare imagination of a moribund tourism myth. It's about turning Ireland into the Disneyland of the Dipsomaniac, where everyone stumbles over the words in the second verse of Galway Bay.
There have been many shameful moments in Ireland's past. But there is no more a shameful an image of the Emerald Isle than a flatbed truck on March 17 pumping out Danny Boy, populated by stout-clutching inebriates wearing foam Guinness hats and shamrock deely boppers."
Still, at the risk of upsetting anyone...
Sláinte!
And how should we celebrate the day that's in it? In an Irish pub getting stocious on Guinness and singing about the Four Green Fields? Not if Eamonn Forde has his way:
"To walk into one of these pubs - and there is not a single pub in Ireland remotely like them - is to walk into an Ireland that only exists in the threadbare imagination of a moribund tourism myth. It's about turning Ireland into the Disneyland of the Dipsomaniac, where everyone stumbles over the words in the second verse of Galway Bay.
There have been many shameful moments in Ireland's past. But there is no more a shameful an image of the Emerald Isle than a flatbed truck on March 17 pumping out Danny Boy, populated by stout-clutching inebriates wearing foam Guinness hats and shamrock deely boppers."
Still, at the risk of upsetting anyone...
Sláinte!