Plastic Paddies

Actually, I’ve gotten to quite enjoy the whole kitch-ness of the day; I mean the crowds marching bands in New York, who ranged from as authentic a bunch of redheads and potato faces as you could wish, through to leotard and sequin-bedecked high schoolers of every color really did seem to be having a good time, and it is hard to begrudge anyone that.

The thing that sticks in my craw is that (in NYC anyhow), the organisers are 100% happy, still – after F**ing 9/11! – to have a bunch of slack-jawed terrorists as the stars of their show, but oh no, it would be such an awful thing to admit to having any gays in the parade.

I’ll eat corned beef and cabbage on or about St Patty’s day, mainly because I like it if done right. But I don’t associate it with Ireland.

I call the dish what it is: New England Boiled Dinner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_boiled_dinner

Wonderful post.

Surely Bono has a simple solution, which is to figure out how much tax he, personally, would be paying if the royalties were flowing through Ireland, and hand it over. Or is that what you are saying? Better still, he could figure out how much he would be paying in an appropriately progressive tax regime, and pay that.

To whom should he pay it? The Irish government? Or Oxfam? The system wrongly gives him control over the money. But, he has control; should he do what the system ought to require him to do (pay to the Irish government), or should he use it the best way possible?

You’d have been much more pissed off if you’d seen my 12 year old leaving the house today in 15 shades of green and a ludicrous leprecaun hat on. I was mortified.

Hi,

There is nothing hypocritical about avoiding payment of taxes by any strategy that is legal even in a tax system you may favor. No person has a moral or ethical obligation to pay any more taxes than they legally owe. Avoiding taxes is a right, and even a personal responsibility to yourself and your family. Evading taxes you legally owe is a crime. There’s a difference.

Every person is ethically entitled to do the best for themselves and their family within the system we are given, whether we like that system or not. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

Have a nice St. Paddy’s Day!
Antti

Corned beef was a substitute for Irish bacon. They evidently got it from the Jews living in NY who obviously did not eat pork. I am not sure why the Irish did not have butchers of their own capable of producing Irish bacon. Nor do I know why the Jews had some sort of monopoly on meat products. Why not find some pork cut close to Irish bacon from Christian butchers? But, that is the story I have always heard about the change from Irish bacon to corned beef.

Soooooo that’s why Mother Superior Conan O’Brien ain’t on right now.

Wow, a post which manages to unify the crochety-old-man “otta my yard” ethos with the upper-middle-class elitist-academic holdier/worldlier-than-thou ethos. Quite a feat!

Happening to be in Dublin yesterday, the Plastic Paddies most in view were the ‘strong men’ walking in the parade with giant plastic dogs, cows, harps, refrigerators and the like supposedly being held aloft by their brawny irish strength. But it was a good day for taking the Dart to Howth, followed by a seafood lunch and cliffside walk in the sun.

#7 Not only do Biffo and/or his people not know how to use an iron, they haven’t told him to have his breakfast up in his hotel room. Instead RTE news on Monday showed Biffo at the business/industry (breakfast?) – he was sitting beside a nice man from Calvin Klein or whatever were making some jobs announcement or something. As the cameras were rolling Biffo was shown shovelling the grub into his gob unlike the man from Calvin Klein who has mastered the art of politely pretending to eat while not actually eating.
What do Biffo’s media handlers actually do if they can’t avoid this kind of embarrassing stuff?

Philanthropy is not an acceptable substitute for paying your fair share of tax. You earn more, you pay more. End of.

What is the justification for this position? It does not seem sensible to me at all. As Harry points out, suppose that Bono decides to resolves his band related dilemma by simply determining how much tax he should pay and handing that money over to the government. But wait! Suppose he has a better use for the money – say development assistance. Surely, there is no moral good that comes from funneling that money through the inefficient government? And if he is specifically spending money on things that he is advocating higher taxes to fund, it hardly seems hypocritical.

In general, I think that private donations are always a justification for tax avoidance. The only caveat, is that you have to demonstrate that first, you would not have been making these donations otherwise, and that, secondly, you can establish that this money is really being better spent. So if you have some cause in Africa that you are concerned about, I don’t think you have the moral right to neglect the interests of your fellow countrymen. But if you are, for example, living in the United States and disugsted with our bloated military budget and making private donations to support sending poor kids to private school in a dollar efficient manner… I don’t see how minimizing your tax burden to fund your private donations could be criticized on an ethical basis.

And how about the non-smoking thing? Over my lifetime I have probably not paid thousands of dollars in taxes as a result of not smoking.

Right. And within the U.S. what of people who, say, move out of California because of the high taxes? Is such a move morally wrong? Does a sense of ethics require that they forward what they would have paid back to Sacramento from their new residence in a different state?

I have a retired relative who splits time during the year between Florida and Michigan. For tax reasons, it works out better to be a Florida resident than a Michigan resident, so that’s what he does. Is that unethical? Does justice demand that he pick the higher tax state rather than the lower one as his official residence?

It all seems rather absurd to me.

Just tell them you’re actually Welsh,

Like St Patrick!

Not to be a mood breaker on the orginal post, but the corned beef I had yesterday was pretty darn good whether there’s anything Irish about it or not.

Not that the horde of Irish Americans here in lovely Cleveland, Ohio have any sense to them . . .

How ungrateful, after all that the community has contributed to Cleveland by way of mobsters, crooked politicians and semi-literate judges.

Come now, we Irish-Americans are a diverse group. We also outnumber the actual Irish-Irish by a fairly large margin, so you’re stuck.

I saw the harps, fridges, etc, bobbing by; but from row ten of the crowd, the brawny carriers were hidden and the symbolism was mysterious.

I also had no idea what it meant.

Surely St. Patrick’s day in America is abut pretending to be Irish-American.

I’ve eaten corned beef at home many a time, Maria, and indeed was taught how to corn it by our butcher while working in a SuperValu in Clondalkin. It’s very good, though I’d never associate with St Patrick’s Day – I’m sure we’ve never had it then – and it has very little resemblance to the reconstituted mush they serve in tins in England, and is perhaps the Enid Blyton food of which you speak.

I’m content just pretending to be English.

I would like to add that I’ve only seen “Noraid-supporting” once in my entire life despite being raised in a town that was founded by someone whose main claim to fame was his actively militant Fenianism.

@ 30 — clearly, you’ve been to Cleveland . . .

‘Recent Irish immigrants’ are unlikely to have been formed by ‘the Republic ca. 1950-1970’

1. When I was a bartender, we referred to March 17 as “the amateur hour.”

2. I live in a college town, and we’re on spring break, so it was safe to go to my favourite bar and have a Guinness. (More because it was a gorgeous spring day than the date, btw.) One the one hand the place had a sign that said, “Happy St. Patty’s day.” OTOH, they were playing the Pogues when I walked in.

3. When I tell folks that my grandfather was in the RIC until independence, when he emigrated, it confuses the hell out of them, not because of the politics, but because they know fuck all about the history.

Sigh.

Dudes, Cleveland rocks, right? At least, that’s the nostalgia one is allowed to feel if one, unlike Howard the Duck or Mr. Stress, left the city after high school. There may be a parallel there to Irish-American nostalgic kitsch. I speak as a nostalgic Cleveland-American.

I’m fascinated to learn that “Enid Blyton” can be deployed as an adjective. Does it mean something like “completely and totally English,” something akin to the American adjective “whitebread”?

Just tell them you’re actually Welsh,

Like St Patrick!
No no no . . . he was Cumbrian (which was Welsh before ‘Welsh’ was invented by the English . . . .

Nick> I was dreading someone being pedantic enough to pick that up…

Isn’t Patty a girl’s name? “Paddy”, please.

I’ve lived in Boston for a decade and change, am rather lapsed in my Catholicism. I finally began to understand St. Patrick’s Day this year while rewatching the Sopranos episode in which Tony travels to Italy to meet with the head of The Family. See, Tony’s embarrassed because all the guys in his crew are uncultured vile cunts, and the ‘real’ Italians make fun of him for it, but then It’s Real Funny how it turns out all the Euro family members are just ‘cultured’ vile cunts, plus they’re moldering in the Old Country and risibly pleased with just how deep their roots go blah blah blah, and Tony gets exactly what he wants (Furio) by recognizing what they can’t, i.e. cuntistry falls outside any one nation’s law or purview.

Of course then Furio wants to romance Tony’s wife and it’s just, wow, drama!! But then instead of Tony having to kill him like on a network channel Furio just semi-anticlimactically leaves because it’s not TV it’s HBO, and Tony and Carmela fight with swear words and he doesn’t hit her. Which is how you know he’s the hero.

NAILED IT!

Another thing, no one I have ever known in Ireland has ever eaten corned beef.

Just for the record, my wife’s grandmother was born on the south side of Dublin and lived there all the days of her 96 years. And her idea of a good day out was certainly to get a plateful of corned beef down her neck at the local carvery. Many hundreds of fellow Dubliners seemed to have had the same idea on the occasions I went with her. (It was damn good silverside, let it be said.)

Mollymooly 33:

People need to realize how much better mashed potatoes + mashed turnips is than either one is by itself. I add sauerkraut too, and lots of butter, of course.. With all three of them it’s a dish by itself, and not a side dish. Some bacon would be nice but isn’t necessary.

This sounds like a yuppy peasantish affectation, but it’s really not*. You could serve it in a restaurant. It’s a health food. But all three of the ingredients I use have a poverty-food reputation.

*Actually, it is in my case. I eat turnips (parsnips, actually,) to spite Brad DeLong. But it wouldn’t have to be.

John Emerson:
“I eat turnips (parsnips, actually,)”

Wait, what? That’s like saying I eat cows (chickens, actually).

Wasn’t famous anti-terrorist campaigner Peter King (R-NY) a Noraid supporter?

Indeed. That re-invention after 9/11 was pretty fucking instant. The (awful) NY Sun noted it, but it’s apparently not polite to mention, especially when he’s parading round the cablenets on March 17th like a refugee from the Lucky Charms box.

Turnips, parsnips, and rutabegas are all members of a group which I call “turnips.” They’re actually related to cabbage-type vegetables, but easily distinguishable. There are also those who say that rutabagas are a type of cabbage, not a type of turnip, and my response is this: anyone who says that is a mere analytical philosopher.

Suppose that parsnips are not turnips, and that rutabagas are cabbages, and that cows are turnips, and that cows are spherical. From this it can be shown that…..

I know the day is not about celebrating Ireland, but about Irish Americans, who are a fine bunch of people now that their Noraid-supporting and parade-homophobia days are behind them.

Sadly, no.

Even as the parade began at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street at 11 a.m., a group of lesbian and gay Irish organizations demonstrated 13 blocks away, at 57th Street, criticizing the organizers for their policy barring gay groups (though not individuals) from marching.

The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who is the city’s most prominent openly gay official, has stayed away from the parade since being told she could not wear even a pin, button or sash indicating gay pride.

_How much Irish do you have to have to qualify as an Irish American?_

I think that if you drank a Guinness once, or know someone who did, you qualify.

@John:

Turnips and rutabagas are both brassicas, and hence, part of the cabbage family, but parsnips aren’t related at all. Parsnips are in the same family as carrots and parsley.

As far as how Irish you have to be to qualify as Irish-American, it’s an identity thing; almost any level is fine as long as you identify Irish-American. I have a number of cousins who are half Irish/half Italian, but they identify as Italian-Americans because that’s the heritage they feel closer to (despite them looking far more Irish).

To muddy things even further – despite being several generations out, I qualify for being recognized as an Italian citizen. If I can wave my Italian passport in front of you, do I get to call myself an Italian even though I’m not different from many Italian-Americans who happen to not qualify due to some technical limitation?

I’ve often wished I had Welsh […] ancestry

truly the only day of the year anyone ever says this.

btw, the secret behind the photograph is presumably that deep down where it counts, Obama is also a buffalo

No, parsnips are carrots.

Is turnip a form of rape, or is rape a form of turnip? Either way, you people should be ashamed of yourselves.

Convenient Finnish-English vegetable glossary. Rape is not indigenous to Finland, so they call it by the borrowed name “rapsi”.

Dave Marsh, one of the rare rock journalists with as much devotion to their craft as to the music itself, as well as the essential attitude, as well as chops and professional status, was going to debate el Bono, owing to interpersonal disagreement escalated to near hostility, evidently, viz. aid to Africa effectiveness thereof, but Bono pulled out, evidently, details at Rock&Rap Confidential.
Slocum et al:
The difference between Mr. Hewson’s tax dodgery and someone leaving California for someplace less burdensome in that regard, is that Bono’s image is what he sells, and his image is frontman for an Irish rock band.
It would be more analogous to talk about someone making millions singing about California, and singing from California in the poetic sense, but moving to Nevada to escape the income taxes California demanded.
Add to that Bono’s posture of giving and concern, lived up to or not in private life. Add to that his Zeligoid appearances at the side of disreputable public figures like Tony Blair etc.
That said, like Maria I’ll still cut him some slack.
Bob Geldof’s perky contentless aspirations to Ghandihood are another matter entirely.

John @79,

Rabbit can go in whatever section you like, but if you start claiming that they are actually turkeys, you might get a few raised eyebrows.

Besides, everyone knows that rutabagas are swedes.

Nick, I’ve got it the grocery problem all figured out. Rabbits at the border between avian and mammalian, tomatoes at the border between fruits and vegetables, bivalves, cephalopods, and crustaceans in separate groups at one end or another of the fish (Seal meat would be at the other end next to the mammals), and rape, rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips between the cabbages and the carrots, in that order.

John:

I would more favor a grocery organization system based on how the food is used, rather than its biological classification. I would put rape and cabbage near the other greens while I would put the turnips, parsnips and rutabagas by the other root vegetables. Since celeriac is a root vegetable, I would put it near the turnips despite it being from the same plant as celery. They probably wouldn’t be near the onions, potatoes, and sweet potatoes since those are rarely refrigerated. In my local grocery store, the meat section is divided up by animal, so there isn’t a strict poultry vs. other meat divide – they just keep it all separate. Rabbit can probably fit easily in with a system like that.

mollymolly & John:
I had always been under the impression that there were explicit signs, though from the article, it sounds like I’m not the only one who was under that impression. I think that John’s point that even if there weren’t explicit signs doesn’t mean that there wasn’t real discrimination is spot on. I’ve always been amazed when I hear my grandmother’s stories about growing up. She’s half German/half Italian, but she has an Italian last name. She had lost of trouble when she was young because her aunt and uncle (her parents died when she was young) wouldn’t let her date Italians and no Germans would go out with her (though she did manage to get a few dates when she pretended that her last name was Heiser, her mother’s maiden name, but when they found out her real name, the dating always stopped).

Also, when we moved to Oklahoma in the 80s, my family had lots of trouble with the local population which didn’t like either Italians or Catholics, so it’s not hard for me to imagine that the Irish legitimately had it hard in the early 1900s.

astrongmaybe, could it just be that in that part of the world most of the non-Irish non-Hispanic Catholics are Italian? Perhaps if your family was in Chicago you’d have more Polish in-laws. Just a wild guess.

In my experience, and my person genome, there is plenty of Irish-Italian mixing. My Italian mom and her siblings married Irish. The Irish side of my family tended to marry other Irish, but few of them lived anywhere near Italians.

All this discussion about St. Pattrick’s Day and things Irish reminds me of that episode on the Sopranos where Paulie keeps having nightmares that he is in Hell–and Hell is an Irish pub called “The Emerald Piper” where it’s St. Patrick’s Day every day for all eternity. LOL! (FWIW, the closest I get to the Irish is my one quarter Scots-Irish McGrath part of the family ancestry–otherwise I’m heavily pure English–‘cept for the Dutch-German Glick part)

Steve & astrongmaybe:
Although my family has been in the US for a few generations, I’m almost completely descended from Irish and Polish Catholics. In my case, this is probably due (apart from the religion) mainly to Chicago’s ethnic geography — they were drawn from an Irish neighborhood that butted right up against a Polish one.

More relevant to the post: I just received what is perhaps the stupidest greeting card ever. I mean, it’s the thought that counts, but Dear Relative could have just called me on the phone and said hi.

[Cover text]:
On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone’s Irish
Pati O’Chair
Jack O’Lantern
Stere O’Speaker
Steg O’Saurus

[Inside text]:
Hope your St. Patrick’s Day is Plenty O’Fun!

Churlish? Give me a break. Typical modern Irish arrogance and nastiness, more like it.

Get over it.

The entire day is about immigrants carving out space in America; doesn’t have anything to do with you. Don’t like it? Go to a Thai restaurant for lunch on the 17th.

Cowen and the other Dublin pols before him trooping to Washington are just a backdrop for an American ethnic show – just like the Mexicans who troop up to the White House for Cinco de Mayo a few weeks from now. That’s not to say they don’t pander to the Yanks – like generations of folks before them – looking for favors from “Rome.”

If they don’t want to play the role, they don’t have to.

As an Irish American, I’m tediously accustomed to the Irish claiming affinity with me when they want something from my country, from immigration or trade preferences to my “auld” tourist dollar, and giving me their provincial scorn when I might dare to notice that my grandparents had something vaguely in common with their own.

Stash your scorn and enjoy the local customs, or ignore them.

It wouldn’t be St Patrick’s Day in America without the annual international wankfest of anti Irish-American bigotry and whiny complaints about green beer, plastic leprechaun hats and alleged support of terrorists that is as sure to surface at this time of year as the sun is to rise.

First of all, I could give a rat’s ass whether or not the self-appointed arbiters of what is or is not Irish consider Irish Americans or their culture to be authentically “Irish.” My father was Irish-born, as were almost all my relatives. My mother was Scottish, and I spent my life surrounded by people from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The culture I was raised in certainly seemed more “Irish” to me than a lot of what I see coming from the smug, bigoted and self-important West Brits and smarmy, lace curtain yuppie Dubliner types you often see in these discussions, who usually model their heavily affected behavior and attitudes on a very stereotypical and contrived view of the English upper class they wish to emulate, and not in a way that’s flattering to them or the English.

I should be recognized that the US is a multicultural society, and that Irish Americans have a distinct subculture here that is different than that of Mexican-Americans, Italian-Americans, American Blacks, and other ethnic groups. This culture is derived from Irish culture in much the same way Tejano culture is derived from Mexican culture. And while that culture may not seem authentically “Irish” to you any more than Tejano culture seems authentically Mexican to many people in Mexico, to us, the distinction is still very strong. It has nothing to do with what our ancestors went through 150 years ago, but our sense of ethnic identity today. If Irish Americans are ignorant of Ireland and its history, the Irish have certainly returned the favor.

Particularly galling to most of us Irish Americans is the idea that we all support terrorism, simply because we are critical of British rule in NI, or that we are “uninformed” if we do not agree with the received wisdom about NI from such impeccable sources as the Daily Mail, or the imperialist apologist du jour.

Frequently, these accusations of support for terrorism are near identical in tone to those made by American neocons against anyone critical of Ukamerisrael’s conduct in the Middle East, and equally credible.

It’s kind of funny, but I have lived here almost my whole life and I have yet to meet anybody who supports the IRA or Noraid. But I have read a large number of apocryphal accounts of travelers braving the wilds of Irish America, landing in a “Plastic Paddy” bar somewhere, and being accosted by men with beards carrying plastic leprechaun hats and threatening extreme violence if said traveler doesn’t pony up for Noraid or the IRA. Indeed, it was while researching these stories that I stumbled across your post, keywords being “plastic paddies” and “Noraid.”

But I have never seen such a thing in my entire life nor do I know any other Irish American who has. Apparently, only anti Irish-American bigots with special 3D glasses available only in the UK and Ireland are able to spot these creatures, as they are invisible to the rest of us, which does unfortunately make it rather difficult for those of us who talk about nothing but our hatred of the Brits and our desire to blow things up to contribute to the cause.

Either that or it’s an urban myth. My vote is for the latter.

I don’t doubt there are Irish Americans who contribute to Noraid, obviously, but the accusations of fund raising in Irish American bars are mostly if not entirely bullshit.

I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that Noraid supports IRA terrorism. I realize that the US, UK and Irish governments have made this claim, but there is no more evidence to back this claim than there is that many legitimate Muslim charities support Hamas or Al Qaeda. Merely making the claim, and repeating it ad nauseum in as part of the UK government’s traditional efforts to pin blame for the problems in NI on Irish Americans does not make it so. Noraid is a registered charity which is required to file annual statements with the US government and whose finances are heavily scrutinized by the agencies of 3 separate governments. If there was solid evidence of money transfers to the IRA, I should think it would have surfaced and been made public by now, and Noraid would have been shut down by the US government.

The IRA has never enjoyed major support from anybody, and there are smalltown militias in Iraq that are better armed than the IRA was in its heyday. If they really received as much financial support from Irish Americans as is alleged by British propagandists, you would think they would be able to afford something more sophisticated than the Bush league arsenal of home-made mortars and obsolescent Tommy guns they are reported to have had.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/386434.stm

So please, next time you come to my country, please try to become a little better informed about who and what we are and what we believe, spare us the whiny racist propaganda, keep your food snobbery to yourself, grab a few pints of green beer, put on some Enya, and relax.