It is telling that the first St Patrick’s Day parades took place not in Ireland but in North America, where Irish soldiers in the British army marched in New York as early as 1762, and Irish immigrants in Boston had gathered to mark the feast day a generation before that. The day remains in many ways a celebration and affirmation of the Irish diaspora: its resilience, its pride, and its stubborn insistence on remembering where it came from. The understanding of Irish national identity, as expressed through culture, language and art, is unstable in the best sense of the word: fluid, ever-shifting and always subject to new voices and new perspectives. The expansion of the St Patrick’s Festival may have been driven by tourism marketing than anything else, but it has transformed what was once a rather drab public holiday into a more vibrant celebration. There has been an unwelcome trend in recent months of a small minority using the symbols of Irish national identity as markers of exclusion and prejudice.

Source: The Irish Times March 17, 2026 07:01 UTC