Dhios a Muire duig a agus Padraig.
This is a Gaelic formal greeting meaning, "God and Mary to you, and also Patrick."
Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone.
It is a great day for the Irish, a great day for the Green. How many of you have Irish blood? There are four times as many Irishmen and women in America as there are in Ireland. New York is the second biggest Irish city in the world.
How many of you have been to Ireland? Most Americans who I know that have been to Europe have never been to Ireland. All of those that have been to Ireland have told me it was their favorite European country.
Most people think that St. Patrick's Day is an Irish holiday. It was actually an Irish holy day, when the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant, went to church.
The first St. Patrick's Day parade was held in New York in 1762. It became the wild drinking event that it is now after the biggest riots in the history of the United States -- the Irish riots in New York in 1863 in which 120 people were killed in three days. The Irish now march down Fifth Avenue in New York every year joined by Irish men and women of African, Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican and Polish descent. Everyone in New York is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.
Most people think that corned beef and cabbage is Irish cuisine. That actually is also American. Back in the 19th century to get from New York to San Francisco one had to sail down the Atlantic, around the treacherous Cape of Good Hope and up the Pacific. By the time they reached San Francisco they were on the brink of scurvy. They would sell their salted meat to the Jewish merchants of San Francisco who would sell them fresh produce that they had purchased from the Irish farmers in the East Bay. The farmers would buy the salted meat from the merchants. Thus, corned beef and cabbage became both an Irish and a Jewish treat, and I hope you will enjoy corned beef and cabbage today.
2016 is an important year for the Irish. One hundred years ago this Easter Monday marked the beginning of the Irish Rising which led to the birth of the Irish Republic. On Easter Sunday, 1916, James Connolly and his Irish Citizen's Army, and Patrick Pearse and his Irish Republican Brotherhood, marched into the center of Dublin dressed for war and carrying weapons. They caught the British entirely by surprise.
Only in Ireland could the following happen: A priest went out into the street screaming about what a scandal having an uprising on Easter Sunday was. So, the Citizen's Army and the Republican Brotherhood turned around and went back. They returned the next day. The British were ready this time and the battle began. Pearse declared that Ireland was a free country and he, a Protestant, was its first president. This was short-lived as Pearse, Connolly and the other signers of the Declaration of Irish Independence were taken out and shot, along with others, by the British.
Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Party, won 78 percent of the Irish vote in the British election of 1918. One of the Sinn Fein veterans of the 1916 rising, the Countess Markievicz, an English Protestant of noble birth, became the first woman ever to win a seat in a European parliament. The British threw the election out and war broke out again. This time Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Army defeated the British, whose army was the notorious Black and Tans, in a bloody guerilla war, and the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland were created. Another 1916 survivor, American born Eamon deValera, declared the Irish Republic in 1938 with himself as its first prime minister.
The Irish border has caused trouble ever since, although at the moment there is a peace treaty in effect in the north of Ireland.
It is my hope that you will go to the Emerald Isle on your next vacation and meet the unique people who will wish you "cead mille failte" -- a hundred thousand welcomes. Visit the pubs, sing the songs and dance the dances, eat the surprisingly good food, have a Guinness, visit the breathtaking sights -- the Ring of Kerry, the Antrim Glens, the Cliffs O'Moher and where the Mountains O'Mourne go down to the sea.
It is my hope that you go out tonight and raise a toast to holy St. Patrick. I will finish with the last words of a poem by William Butler Yeats:
"I write it in a verse.....
Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn
... a terrible beauty is born."
Sean O'Hare works in the freight transportation industry. He lives in Anchorage. He'll give a talk on Ireland and St. Patrick's Day at noon today at the Bartlett Club meeting at the Anchorage Senior Center, 1300 East 19th Ave.
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