As I write these words, it’s a gorgeous spring day, the first truly warm day since, it seems after this expansive winter, the late Jurassic. It’s also the day upon which most people in America celebrate themselves and/or others being Irish.
I am personally guilty, on this fair St. Patrick’s Day, of something nearing a cliche of St. Paddy’s excess: at lunch, I rolled around town with the sunroof open, blaring the Pogues’ “The Sickbed of Cuchulainn” so loud all the nearby leprechauns abandoned their pots of gold in dismay: “They’ll take you from this dump you’re in and stick you in a box/ Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground/ But you’ll stick your head back out and shout, ‘We’ll have another round.'” Such stuff may or may not be cliche if you possess a last name that used to be Gaelic, but that song is such a slice of brilliance it’s hard to care. It’s also true that I play the Pogues that loud the other 364 days of the year, just not always with the sunroof open.
It’s an odd turn of events, all this celebration of, mostly, a cartoon Irishness. Time was, of course, when being Irish meant facing signs that said “No Irish need apply.” Even now, it means facing certain assumptions, mostly of Catholicism and, fairly or not, that MacGowan-celebrated extraordinary penchant for consuming large quantities of stout and/or whiskey.
That latter assumption has always proved a bit of a sticky one, but in a turn toward—audacity? honesty? embracing misconception?—the Boston Irish Tourism Association is proudly touting the Massachusetts premiere of a film called White Irish Drinkers. It’s an odd choice of title in other ways, too—”White” Irish?
There are, to be sure, non-white Irish folk, mostly immigrants in the wake of the Emerald Isle’s years of prosperity when it was dubbed “The Celtic Tiger.” But it seems, on the surface, as reduntant as saying “crazy Tea Partier” or “feckless Democrat.”
The film synopsis, too, sounds like a skating near the edge of cartoon—it’s about two brothers in 1970s Brooklyn whose parents are “Paddy (Stephen Lang), a longshoreman, and his long-suffering wife, Margaret (Karen Allen), who puts up with Paddy’s drinking and abusive behavior.” The brothers end up on the wrong end of the mafia, and find a way out that involves booking a Rolling Stones gig. Though, to be fair, the trailer portrays a relatively compelling, gritty street-crime drama.
No matter the film’s success or failure, it’s part of an interesting phenomenon: the increasing and surprising coolness factor of being an Irish working stiff. At least in movies like Boondock Saints and The Departed, and in the songs of the Dropkick Murphys.
It’s hard to know exactly what’s brought the Boston Irish Tourism Association to such an embracing of the hard-drinking Irish cliche, but it’s not entirely unwelcome. At least it’s not Riverdance or Celtic Thunder—all squeaky clean cartoon triumph and “top o’ the mornin’,” as if Ireland were a magical heaven. The grittier cliche is a cartoon, too, but it’s got roots in truer stuff: hard-living Irish workers doing the tough business immigrants have always done, things like building railroads and unloading ships. That’s a strange kind of progress, but at least it stands a chance of bringing the tyranny of yet more terrifying cliches to a proper end.
