Happy Saint Patrick's Day?

Eamonn Forde is not convinced:

Probably the wrong sentiment to express today, but St Patrick's Day makes me embarrassed to be Irish. My ruddy cheeks burn with shame as green, white and orange bunting is draped listlessly on every pub with extra-cold Guinness on tap and all talk turns, inevitably, to “the craic”.

The “craic” is an infuriatingly redundant phrase like “OMG” or “LOL”, so overused that all meaning is syringed from its spine and its etymology kicked around the Ring of Kerry until it crumbles like cheap peat. The “craic”, a byword for forced joviality, is the dirty red diesel on which the whole sorry St Patrick's Day bandwagon runs.

The celebration originally marked the arrival of the Catholic faith on Irish shores, but in an increasingly secular country, it now celebrates the futility of drunkenness. It says everything about what it means to be Irish these days that the biggest parades take place hundreds of miles from Irish soil where a once-proud diaspora's celebration of its past has been hijacked by anyone who has seen The Quiet Man and wants to get noisily bladdered. They may as well wear their heart on their sleeves and pay a gaggle of pale-faced colleens with pigs under their arms to spray the streets with whiskey and potatoes.

In Alan Partridge's phrase, “de big oidea” behind St Patrick's Day today is to amplify every cultural cliché to the point where it is impossible to tell if it is parody, pastiche or homage. The rise of St Patrick's Day is traceable to the rise of that great blight on Ireland's image overseas - the theme pub.

Ireland is known for its drinking, propelled in part by the mythology surrounding writers such as Brendan Behan and sportsmen such as George Best and Alex Higgins. None of this acknowledges the fallout of alcoholism. It is passed over in favour of soulless drinking spaces, such as Waxy O'Connor's and O'Neill's, where the windows are festooned with bicycles hauled out of canals and wicker baskets. In these howling “craic cocoons”, the game is to drink so much that your liver hardens to the texture of the Blarney Stone.

To walk into one of these pubs - and there is not a single pub in Ireland remotely like them - is to walk into an Ireland that only exists in the threadbare imagination of a moribund tourism myth. It's about turning Ireland into the Disneyland of the Dipsomaniac, where everyone stumbles over the words in the second verse of Galway Bay.

There have been many shameful moments in Ireland's past. But there is no more a shameful an image of the Emerald Isle than a flatbed truck on March 17 pumping out Danny Boy, populated by stout-clutching inebriates wearing foam Guinness hats and shamrock deely boppers.