WELL . . . I don't know . . . We're all supposed to be delighted at the tarting up of the Patrick's Day Parade. We're all supposed to agree that the one we've had all these years is old hat and an embarrassment and not sufficiently imaginative" for the people who measure imaginativeness round here. But I felt for our glum little parade. I thought that in the absence of anyone knowing by instinct how to celebrate our national day - or even to agree on whether we've got a nation to go with our national day - the trade `n' industry parade was quite a sensible way of handling things.
We counted our possessions in it, so to speak. We didn't have just one Downes's Bakery bread van (it was Downes, wasn't it, or was it Johnson Mooney and O'Brien that used to enter their entire fleet?). We had tens of bread vans. We used to have every single motorcycle in the Army, if I remember correctly. In later years we've had all the frozen baton twirling little girls in Greater Dublin, not just some of them.
The parade may not have displayed any flair, or artfulness, or beauty. But then, we're not like that. We're not an artful and beautiful people. We're materialists, and that's what the parade was a modest showing off of the modest things we've got.
Maybe down in the west they're all artful and, imaginative and full of beauty. They say they are, anyway. But this was Dublin's parade, not some provincial town's. Dublin's and America's. It was quite magnificently true to the 1950s. Same as Irish America, actually. A place as small as Galway can afford to mess around with culture in the form of Catalan acrobats and Native Indian mask dancers and so on. But here in the capital we have to be serious about business. And business equals lorries and vans and very, very cold groups of uniformed public employees.
Even if it wasn't always numbingly cold on Saint Patrick's Day, there's nothing Mediterranean about Irish transport, industry and commerce. Now, I suppose, they'll have mime artists. Made up things. Whereas we used to have ambulances. Real things.
We're just going to be like everywhere else, now. We'll have an imaginative, visually exciting, blab blab parade. You might as well be in Rio de Janeiro or Barcelona. Whereas we in Dublin used to have what: Marshall McLuhan would have called a cool parade. In other words, it wasn't hot", not in any sense. It didn't do all the imaginative work for you the way television, say, does.
IT was like radio. (Maybe hot and cool are the other way around.) You had to use your own imagination to believe that the parade was even meant to be entertaining, much less that it was entertaining.
This is something that professional paradesters forget. It was never what was in the parade that mattered. It was going to the parade. Going into town on the bus. Wearing your green rosette. Town being different. Everything lasting for ages, because of the multiplicity of breadvans. Getting chips. If the parade had consisted of the entire civil service marching in platoons in their good Dannimacs, generations of Dubliners would still have hauled their kids in to see it.
They liked it. Marian Finucane for instance, a notoriously sound woman formerly a sound child - used to go into town on her own to see it when she got too old to be brought. She'd squeeze her way through all the legs to the front. Mind you: she's tall. Small Dubliners have never seen more than swaying tops of lorries. Quite a few people must have enjoyed it, because they went to it of their own free will. The crash barriers are there to prove it. Admittedly they went to Macnas's Gulliver, too. But Gulliver was easy. Any old body can enjoy colourful imaginative entertainment. It took a real Dubliner to enjoy 25 bread vans followed by a flatbed truck with a frozen swing band on it.
YEAR after year, runny nosed children in parkas were hoisted on to shoulders to admire the ATA Alarm year after year it won. Year after year RTE's presenters met their Waterloo, as they shivered outside the GPO amidst the motley crew that represents the establishment on Patrick's Day, and ran out of things to say. There's only so much you can say about a lorry covered in crepe paper flowers, even if you can legitimately say it in Irish first and then in English or, for variety, the other way around. The only absolutely unembarassed RTE parade presenter there ever was Bibi. But alas! Where is Bibi now?
There was a case for leaving it alone. This whole place is getting too twee and Disneyfied and professionally Wonderlanded altogether. Do you know what the traditional Patrick's Day Parade was like? It was like de Valera's post offices - lots of which are still around as their grand plain, sturdy selves. As buildings, they make a stab at a kind of civic impressiveness. But they don't insist. They don't suck up to the citizen by being charming or comfortable or anything like that. Take them or leave them is what they imply.
Same for the parade. If beauty and imaginativeness and a good time is what you're looking for you may take yourself off to Galway or Orlando or watch the telly. But leave O'Connell Street in an east wind to the real Irish. Saint Patrick had it hard on the slopes of Slemish herding his sheep. He was no wimp. And his parade isn't for wimps, either.