Why I hate St. Patrick's Day:

I know, I'm a terrible person for this, but I honestly don't care. I'm not wearing green today. I'm not going to Finn MacCool's or fado to drink green beer. I didn't go to a parade. I'm not eating fricking corned beef and cabbage.

St. Patrick's Day is primarily an Irish-American holiday, celebrated by a bunch of guys who are 1/8 Irish-American and have never been to Ireland. And there's nothing wrong with being one of those people, but that doesn't mean you should go around wearing "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" buttons either. You're not.

St. Patrick's Day is an excuse for these guys to go around reinforcing stereotypes of Irish men as maudlin drunks, who get in their cups and sing songs about the injustice of the British and the valor of the IRA. That's actually all they ever do in Ireland, you know. Drink and go to Mass and blow up British tanks. Right.

You don't get to be Irish one day a year. Either you're Irish and you deal with what that means every day, or you're not and you don't. You don't get to sing "Come out you Black and Tans" unless you actually know who the Black and Tans were and what they did and why they're so universally hated in Ireland. Irish songs and being Irish means being a part of a long history, some bad, some good. Like all history. But you can't just be a part of it when you want to. Basically, if you can't understand it, that's fune, but either learn about Irish history or shut up about it.

I emailed my friend Donal who lives outside Dublin to see if he was doing anything special today. His answer, "well, it's a public holiday, so I'm sleeping in and going hiking in the afternoon." No pubs, no big corned beef dinner, nothing.

Easter is the day to celebrate being Irish. "Tell me father why are you so sad on this fine Easter morn, when Irish men are proud and glad of the land where they are born." On Easter, we celebrate bravery and freedom and people who died for what they believed in. We can celebrate Joseph Plunkett, Tom Clark, Sean MacDiarmida, and the rest. We can remember the dark cells on the long corridors in Kilmainham, the couple getting married in the hours before one was killed, O'Rahilly lying in a pool of his own blood fighting an action he disapproved of, the crosses in Kilmainham courtyard. We can think of those who died earlier and later for their country, of Mick Collins and Kevin Barry, of Robert Emmet. We can celebrate in the Irish way, with food and drink and talk. It's sort of like a wake.

On Easter I can be proud of being Irish, proud of who I am and who my parents are. I can't feel that way seeing a bunch of drunk guys in green plastic hats on the Red Line.