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You are here: Home / Dublin / Dear Saint Patrick, it’s complicated

Dear Saint Patrick, it’s complicated

March 17, 2018 by EmmaP 2 Comments

Ah glorious Saint Patrick! Once a year I’ve thought about him, or ignored him, or celebrated his feast day to the hilt, around the world from Hawaii to London, Warsaw to Montreal, Rome to Oslo. And now we’re here as a family in Dublin, and imagining what it’ll be like.

Read the full story – the “before”- in the Irish Times of March 16th. The next post will be the “after”.



 

Like many Irish living abroad I’ve had an on-off relationship with our national holiday. It’s the one day of the year when you can dip into that pool of Irish identity that you always know is there, but which you might choose to disconnect from for the rest of the year.

When I lived in New York, more than 20 years ago, I chose not to dip into the Irish scene. I never went to the St Patrick’s Day parade, perhaps seeing it as a local Irish-American event and somewhat removed from the country I had deliberately left only a few years before. I was actually more curious to watch the others nationalities – like the Poles or Haitians – when they paraded down 5th Avenue and lit up the Empire State Building with their colours…..

Read on

Filed Under: Dublin, Irish, Moving to Ireland, Travel

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Comments

  1. Yvonne Burke says

    April 10, 2018 at 12:31 am

    How do I Blog travel stories and or memoirs, in the Irish Times?
    Best,
    Yvonne

  2. EmmaP says

    April 17, 2018 at 8:13 am

    hi Yvonne you can contact the editor of the Abroad section, Ciara Kenny, who is always looking for interesting stories from Irish people abroad. Emma
    https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad

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I write about language and the quirks of our family life in Dublin and previously in Italy and Norway. Read More…

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Wash Your Language

Wash Your Language

Musings on language and daily life in Ireland with memories from Canada, Italy and Norway

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A few coincidences.As I walked past our local takeaway today, I spotted this manhole cover at my feet. It commemorates an event on the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 - which was marked today, as always, on Easter Monday, 109 years later. The image shows the man who first raised the Irish Republic flags on the roof of the GPO, one of the main buildings held by the rebels that week. His name was Éamonn Bulfin, he was about 24 and along with many others, he was arrested and sentenced to death by the British authorities when the rising was quashed. But the Argentine ambassador intervened, because Éamonn was an Argentinian citizen - so he was deported instead, back to Buenos Aires. He had been born there in 1892 to 2 Irish parents who had emigrated to Argentina and had 5 kids. The family moved back to Ireland (presumably by slow boat over many weeks) when he was about 10. He went to St. Enda's School, became a fluent Irish speaker and a republican and so got involved in the Rising.After being deported back to BA after the rising, the Argentine government felt the need to arrest him for "skipping out on military service" though it was probably trying to appease the British government who they were already fighting with over the Falkland Islands. This is 1917.After 2 years in prison, Éamonn moved to Ireland again after independence, after doing a stint as the first ambassador of the new Irish state to Argentina. Why? Because Argentina absorbed tons of Irish emigrants - today it's thought 500k to 1 million Argentinians claim Irish heritage!He farmed in Offaly, wrote short stories in English and Spanish, moved to Donnybrook when he retired and after he died in 1968 (buried near Birr) a road in Inchicore was named after him.Oh and one of his sisters married Sean McBride who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 for co-founding Amnesty International.And, of course today Argentina is in the news today as dear old Papa Francesco came from Buenos Aires (Italian heritage) though I also just learned that he never went back to that city after becoming pope.So that's the manhole cover that pops up in a few places around Ireland, and outside our local takeaway.(Photo from Society for Irish Latin American Studies) #EasterRising #manholecover #irishhistory ... See MoreSee Less

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Wash my language?

Språkvask is the Norwegian word for proofing text. Literally it means “language wash”; a more poetic way of saying it!

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