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[March 18, 2006]

Why do we have St Patrick's day in frozen March?

(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)YOU FEEL so sorry for them, the poor little girls who grit their teeth and face into weather that would have made Tom Crean look at Ernest Shackleton and ask: 'What do you say we let those feckers on the Endurance fend for themselves?


The majorette outfits that looked so pretty when the kiddies joined the troupe in September now provide a thin gossamer layer between health and hypothermia. Goosebumps the size of golf balls pockmark thighs that have turned blue with the Nordic chill; they look like the first wave of a Smurf invasion.

Even the cheery tuba-andtrombone sounds of John Philip Sousa in the background - played by slick American marching bands wearing, you suspect with some envy, duvets under their tunics - cannot take your mind off the inevitable.

Not only are you frozen but the fact that your child hasn't moved for 15 minutes means he has accidentally touched a lamppost and become grafted to it and you will spend at least half an hour gently blowing on the join to ensure he gets home with the skin he left in.

Welcome to St Patrick's Day, the world's most perverse national holiday, held ostensibly at the start of spring but which, almost magnetically, attracts the worst weather of the year.

True to form, the forecast for today's parade tells us it will be like a November Tuesday in Murmansk. Evelyn Cusack looked horror-stricken after last night's Six-One News when she told us: 'In the fresh winds, it will feel more like zero than four or five degrees.' It doesn't have to be this way.

Look at the Fourth of July in the U.S. An entire continent, for heaven's sake, and every city positively throbs in midsummer heat. Granny quietly melts on the stoop as Mom lightly dusts the apple pie with cinnamon, Pop selects the teams for the softball and Good Ol' Uncle Joe keeps the trough of ice- cold Budweiser filled to the brim.

Take Australia Day, January 26, the very apogee of the Antipodean summer, when a line of barbies from Canberra to Perth sizzles with the juices of millions of prawns while proud Bruces and Sheilas swap stories about their melanomas.

Look at France, where July 14 is spent looking at topless sunbathers on the beach at Bandol. Or Italy on June 2, where they eat fettucine and drink Barolo on the patio. Or Portugal on June 10, where even a fado singer on the 14th verse of a lament for a dead sailor can't take your mind off the fact that it's hot, mighty hot, and you don't have to go to work.

It's not that March 17 has any huge significance. People say it is the day St Patrick died, which is a bit rich given that we don't even agree on who St Patrick was.

He might have been a Welsh shepherd called Maewyn Succat. He might have been from Somerset, he might even have been from Normandy (unlikely, or he would have used the shamrock for a cream sauce).

Others think he is a compendium of two bishops, Patricius and Palladius, but no one is entirely sure.

Yet everyone seems to agree that, whoever he was, he died on March 17 in 467. Could we not just pretend there was a mess-up with the Gregorian calendar and say he died on July 17? Or maybe check out his date of birth and celebrate that instead?

Because all March does is make his feast day relentless and dreary. This used to be even more so when the pubs closed on Paddy's Day and you had to kidnap a puppy to get a drink at the RDS Dog Show.

Or take a train, since, oddly, the licensing laws didn't apply to rolling stock. I remember my brother and I going to Cork and back for the day once, just to get a pint on the train and just because we could.

Nowadays, of course, Paddy's Day is all about drinking. The airwaves will be full again with people moaning about street bingeing and fornication in alleyways. But I salute anyone whose baser instincts are so impervious to that March mistral which distracts all but the most carnal from thoughts of congress. Well, with anything other than Damart long-johns anyway.

The result of the whole business is a day that is joyless.

Even the traditional one-day dispensation from the travails of Lent is not enough to lift the spirits.

And the razmatazz we now associate with the day - Macnas puppets weaving their way through O'Connell Street, McDonald's selling green milkshakes, the floats and the acrobats - are largely American inventions reimported to give Dublin and other towns the feel of an equally cold Fifth Avenue.

It doesn't have to be as depressing as the Abel Alarms floats that used to win prizes (and what other country, on its national day, would hand out a gong to someone reminding you that while you were at the parade, some gurrier was in your bedroom leafing through your smalls?).

Depressing In 2001, the year of foot and mouth, we postponed Paddy's Day until the summer - and it was extraordinary.

The sun shone. A light zephyr of a breeze carried the scent of flowers and outdoor cooking across the city. A great sundrenched laziness set in around teatime as we all unfurled the Foxford rugs and dozed to the sound of humming bees and the unmistakable tang of newmown grass.

It was the perfect time to celebrate a sense of communality, for we are all Mediterranean at heart in Ireland - we just don't get many opportunities to express it.

Let St Patrick's Day stand if we must, but let's have another day in midsummer, a day that celebrates what we are, not what we were. We could call it SSIA Day, maybe, to mark the maturity of the savings accounts that will allow us roam the coasts of Europe buying up tracts of beach we can retire to.

No, St Patrick's Day celebrates the old lreland, one where a sliver of colour couldn't but brighten the monochrome palette of an isolationist country nervously finding its feet in the post-war world.

Now that we are all thrusting, modern, sexy, sophisticated - and centrally heated - Europeans, could we take some good advice from our EU friends and have our national day in June or July, when we can really enjoy it.

Anything to make sure we don't have to give the poor majorettes the freefone number for Childline.

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