St Patrick's Day

'Are you out for St Pat's?' they used to say. In Liverpool twenty years ago this was an important day. A breakfast in the Irish Centre, the old Georgian Irish Centre near where the Irish used to live by the Catholic cathedral, a real Irish rib-sticker of eggs, potatoes, mushrooms, toast etc and bacon for those who indulge. The little shop there used to sell shamrocks on St Patrick's day and wearing them as buttonholes we would saunter out onto the streets. I carefully put mine in water one year and wore it the following year as well. Nothing was made of St Pat's in the city in those days and only occasionally would we see other shamrocks, other gentle celebrants. From late morning we would make a long slow pub crawl through the lower end of the city's pubs; for famously Liverpool has no real Irish pubs. Gentle pub crawls have a magnetism and we would collect people who stopped for one, or two, or the whole afternoon, people out for different reasons, work, shopping, on the way to the bank. A motley crew of suits and office frocks and shopping bags, out for the moveable drinking feast that was St Pat's. The slow gentle drinking would go on all day and break up as the pubs filled with ordinary drinkers in the early evening. The talk was general and specific, but always seemed to come round to family and links with Ireland, forgotten stories, old villages and lost relatives.

My father's mother's family the Downeys were originally from Co Kerry, and the stories have it that they left Kerry because of the Famine and went to Cork, and then to Liverpool. I have always half-thought that the family were Catholic and lost their faith in the robust secular energy of England. My grandmother was married in the Anglican St Cleopas' in Toxteth, but had a hologram of the Last Supper and called her only daughter Patricia because she was born on 17th March; scant evidence but not very Protestant things to do. I am not Irish, just as I am not Welsh, nor Scottish because of a Scots grandmother; these are threads in my heritage, not the heritage itself. But Kerry is a stronghold of Gaelic and I often wonder if this too is a lost language in my heritage, a linguistic glass ceiling beyond which I cannot travel. So tonight I will remember old Irish drinking days and the shop that sold shamrock, and raise a glass to my Auntie Pat on her birthday.