Paddy go home

Who do they think we are? You know: foreigners, Americans, anyone coming over here as a tourist? What sort of an image have we? Who creates it? And why? Irish is Guinness, wherever you go in the world. It's also very green and beautiful, jam-packed with diddily-iddily music; it's gushingly friendly Oirish people who would have many a tale to tell about the leprechauns, your Irish ancestors or growing up in a sort of quaint abject poverty in which an unshakable strength of spirit prevailed. Looking at our own media coverage these days we might be thinking more along the lines of child sexual abuse, all manner of corruption and ecologically dodgy food in our supermarkets.

Last week we devoted five days to the celebration of our patron saint. St Patrick's Day is an event celebrated by Irish people worldwide. How the celebration is "sold" abroad is quite an insight into how Irishness itself is sold.

Traditionally, the parade is the big deal. In Dublin there wasn't much in the way of traditional Irish music this year, but it was certainly bigger and better than ever before.

Up until recently, the parades in Ireland paled substantially by comparison with the offerings in the States, particularly in old Irish centres such as Boston. In New York, a vital thoroughfare, Fifth Avenue, is shut down for hours as a succession of police, fire-fighters and bands march dully along; this huge disruption happens whatever day of the week March 17th falls on, in a show of strength unmatched by any other ethnic group in the city. (The Italians' big parade occasion, Columbus Day, is a bank holiday.)

While we develop our celebrations here, St Patrick is making his mark in quite a remarkable way all over the place. Tokyo, according to an article in the Washington Post last week (yes, an article in a US newspaper describing Paddy's Day in Japan), was awash with pints of Guinness last Wednesday.

At Tokyo's Bewley's Cafe - is your mind boggling yet? - you could get some trad. Irish stew, the St Patrick's Day T-shirts were flying off the shelves and a good 5,000 people were estimated to have marched in to watch Patrick's Japanese parade. Most of those people were Japanese. However, celebrations elsewhere are still geared to the participation of Irish people, undoubtedly provoked by a deep sense of cultural identity.

As Tim Pat Coogan says, it stems from an "affection for one's childhood, history, roots". But it also makes a lot of people a lot of money. Countries sell an image of themselves which don't always quite encapsulate the reality of their socio/economic/ political/cultural selves. When we think of Spain, for example, we think flamenco dancers in mad frilly frocks and hunky matadors plunging swords into the necks of raging bulls. We also think suntan and paella. The occasional artist like Joan Miro might spring to mind, and it's possible a vague notion of some rebel group initiating a bombing campaign would occur to those of us who have a yen for the foreign news coverage of some media outlets.

However, for example, we are unlikely to have much insight into the political tension synonymous with the area in northern Spain known as Catalonia. The complexities of most countries are lost in superficial news accounts, and particularly in tourist promotional literature. The Irish tourist board, Bord Failte, and the many, many companies which sell `traditional Irish' products abroad, understandably go to great lengths to create and perpetuate an image of Ireland which could reasonably be described as essentially "Oirish".

An event like the St Patrick's Day celebrations gives the media a focus for coverage - coverage that's inclined to be magnificently romantic. But this year, the image of the dancing Irish was overshadowed - even in America - by problems with the peace process. The Taoiseach did present a Waterford Crystal bowl of shamrock to President Clinton, as per annual tradition. However, with Trimble, Adams and Ahern all sitting down with US officials for talks on implementing the Belfast Agreement, political reality impinged on the hard sell of a land of sexy jigs and oodles of heritage.

The story about the day's events in the Los Angeles Times referred to "a sunny but troubled St Patricks' Day", while the Washington Post skipped Paddy and got straight to the point - with Clinton hoping to "re-energise the stalled Northern Ireland peace accord". Which brings us to another image people have of Ireland.

Just as we might think `war', when we hear the former Yugoslavia, rather than the architecture of Dubrovnik, or the 14th-century frescos of the monastery of Gracanica in Kosovo, an awful lot of people think violence when they hear Ireland. Like the impression of other global trouble spots, the image swings from one extreme to the other.

On a good day, we are Nobel Peace Prize winners; on a bad day we are killing each other. Living here day in, day out, we experience quite a lot in the middle, but few news flashes have time for the intricacies which might project the more complex image of what "Irish" really is. Different agendas on different days of the week promote an image of what we are right across the planet. Bad news sells papers; good news sells merchandise.