AT boarding-school, the nuns gave St Patrick's Day the full treatment. The girls who played the violins in the school orchestra were put out on chairs in the little arcaded square outside the chapel, and as we filed out of Mass they fiddled a jaunty "Sior Glor do Naomh Padraig..."
That bright sound, and the gusty spring sunlight, and the clean colour of new daffodils, and the memory of us girls at our Ceili Mor that evening, have left me with an impression of sparkle and celebration about the day. Our nuns were Irish speakers. They took St Patrick and the idea of Ireland's national day with unselfconscious seriousness.
We never had civics lessons or anything like that, back then. We were all supposed to have been born civic-minded - tiny, dour, responsible people. St Patrick's Day was the nearest the then culture ever came to asserting a shared Irish citizenship. Although it was a saint's day it wasn't at all religious in feeling, and few, if any, people had any kind of personal devotion to the saint himself.
But though it was the national day, it wasn't a patriotic one, either: none of the usual gory and tragic passages in our history were associated with it. It provided quite a reasonable sort of occasion on which to be mildly pleased with being a citizen of an Irish nation.
The same feelings in a minor key were aroused by the old St Patrick's Day Parade in Dublin I've written before, with affection and amusement, about its fleets of bread-vans and convoys of motor-cycle outriders - Army messengers, perhaps - who wore those black leatherette buckled helmets which seem to have been inseparable from the foundation of the State.
It was a parade, before it became mixed up with tourism and then with floats covered in crepe-paper flowers, which modestly counted the assets of a modest State. Its lorries and tuba-players. Its politicians in big black overcoats turning purple with the cold on their reviewing stand. Its tableaux vivants of The Children of Lir on the back of lorries.
The Republic of Ireland, it seemed to say, is no pleasure-seeking, profit-making, brash new entity. It partakes of an ancient lineage. When it comes to indicating its idea of how its citizens should behave it wishes to echo, however distantly, idealistic austerity, and a classical high mindedness.
By now everyone knows that that official style was a lie. If Ireland was quiet for decades - into the 1980s almost - that is because a gag was being held over its mouth. Its plain and sturdy exterior - symbolised for me by the old Oifig an Phoists - covered an astonishing amount of the most primitive cruelty. A part of the story of what was done to the powerless has begun to come out. And there's more to come.
And the opposite is also true, and was also not acknowledged in the civic ideal. There was happiness and vigour in real life. Dire poverty and emigration were one thing: but there were other things.
Cycling with pals through a pristine landscape. The joyousness of dancing and courting. Local bawdinesses and satires and exciting feuds. An innocence and mannerliness that survived long after they might have done. The truth of how things were, to be Irish, was both more ugly and more attractive than any public representation of Irishness captured.
There was no clear image of what an ordinary Irish citizen should be like. We didn't see ourselves in any parade. We didn't have might to display, or prosperity, or a proud history, the way other states do. We had a national parade, that is, a display of civic pride, without knowing what there was to be proud of. What non-military acts were there were to celebrate, other than banishing snakes? Who were our citizen-heroes? (Heroines, of course, were out of the question).
NO doubt the reasons why we are so weak in citizenship are very complex and very ancient. But weak we were, and are. Things seem to work here when they are personalised. One person will very readily do another person, standing in front of them, any favour. And things work on the level of abstraction.
If you stopped people in the street and asked: them whether they love Ireland, for instance, they would say that they do, and they would mean it. But ask them whether they feel like citizens of the Republic and they'd look at you, baffled. In the middle - that's where the national weakness is. That's where there's a void about being a good citizen.
To take an example - people have to be prodded and beaten into taking any kind of care of the landscape. Individuals insist on trashing their own part of it for their own reasons: the overall picture has nothing to do with them. People roll down the windows of their cars and throw their litter out.
That's somebody else's territory they're moving through. This infected cow is passed off at that mart. That dodgy meat is flogged off by this butcher. People spend their whole lives up to their necks in minute scams about false insurance claims, unfinished jobs, improperly applied for grants, money into the hand and lies to the Social Welfare, and so on and so forth ...
I suppose all this is tolerable enough. But where the concept of "civitas" matters - where we absolutely have to have an articulated idea of civil probity - is in the precisely so-called civil service. That's what the plain old St Patrick's Day parades used to evoke - the civil service.
Those legions of ladies in homeknit jumpers who were paid a miserable pittance for their days behind their desk: those men in shiny suits who could hardly wait to push the last piece of paper away and get to the pub - they may have been unexciting, but they were sound. I took it as an article of faith that Irish civil servants were the moral backbone of the State.
The continuing revelations about the role of the Department of Agriculture in the beef industry scandal is the most unassimilable thing to have happened to the old idea of Ireland. It draws a line under one kind of ideal. The blood transfusion scandal is too grave to refer to in the almost playful context of a farewell to the old St Patrick's Days.
But you can see how low standards in the public service can matter, and you can ask yourself - how are we to get back to the idea that there are jobs worth doing well and honourably for their own sake and for the sake of people who trust you? At least, in the dim days of early modern Ireland, the notion of serving the public was not mocked.
Maybe it is just as well, as we come to terms with such things, that the old, high-minded, plain living parade has gone. There were ideals behind the making of modern Ireland. But they didn't become part of the moral texture of the place. They used to roll out all the Post Office vans as an incitement to civic virtue. But civic virtue, it turns out, wasn't to be so easily invoked.