St. Paddy's Day

They say on St. Patrick's day everyone has a touch of the Irish in them.  That goes for me too although actually I do have an Irish background.  My father is Irish.  Not Irish Catholic but Irish protestant.  He grew up in farm country in south western Ontario.  No school buses back then and he told that most days he was chased home from school because he was Irish.  Religion didn't matter.  Where you came from did.

Now I always thought the family came over in the 1840's during the famine in Ireland but he says Hodge's have been here much longer than that.  I saw a documentary the other day about the Irish coming to Canada in the 1840.  Not a pretty sight.  A lot of them landed in Toronto and they talked about cases where more than half the people in the city left because they were afraid of disease and riots that the Irish would bring with them.

If you've seen Ken Burn's series on New York or seen the movie Gangs of New York you get a good idea of how the Irish were treated.  The term "paddy wagon" comes from those days when police used take their wagons out on Friday nights to gather up the drunken Irishmen or as they called them "paddys" and put the in the paddy wagon to cart them off to jail. I recall a documentary on the Kenndy family from a month or so ago.  No matter how rich the patriarch Joe Kennedy became, no matter how big he built his mansion, no matter what he accomplished in politics he was never welcomed into Boston society.

I'm not a big flag waver and I don't think of myself as Irish-Canadian, just Canadian but I do have a soft spot for the Irish.  The history fascinates me, books like "Trinity" by Leon Uris fascinates and so does Irish folklore and the Irish fight for independance. And when he plays my favourite golfer is Padrig Harrington. 

The Irish are the last of the Celts.  They've given me my 2 favourite actors,  Daniel Day Lewis and Gabriel Byrne. The Irish gave us George Bernard Shaw and supposedly the greatest author of the 20th century, James Joyce which I might agree with If I could understand anything he wrote.

With all those potatos the Irish are famous for you'd think they would have figured out vodka. Nope, they gave us Irish whiskey instead. They also gave us green beer.  I might have an Irish whiskey today to celebrate but I don't think I'll ever be Irish enough to drink green beer.