I was lying in bed trying to come up with an original post to publish on St. Patrick’s day or International All Things Irish Day. I was tired from a day washing dishes and cutting up melons and my tiredness was wrestling with my insomnia. It’s obligatory don’t you know for a Catholic blogger with a Irish Catholic wife to come up with something new every year on St. Paddy’s day. I was sinking in the gloom of a blank canvas with nothing but a dry desert of nothing coming to my brain.
And then it hit me like a lucky charms rainbow.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day .
Perhaps you want to celebrate the day but feel like a fake cause your
Italian, Australian, French, Antarctican, Kenyan, Korean, Brazilian, Texan, or Martian.
Well I’ve good news for you. You can now become Irish very easily.
All you need to do is follow these 24 easy steps and you can become Irish in 2024.
The Steps are in no particular order.
1. Get more freckles. Because the more freckles you have the more Irish you are. Everyone needs the map of Ireland on their face.
Photo By Loren Kerns
2. Marry an Irish lass whose father is from Limerick and gain lots of new Irish Cousins.
3. Have red or ginger colored hair.
4. Learn to speak with an Irish Accent.
5. Watch Father Ted and BallyKissAngel. Those are now your favorite TV shows.
6. Visit Ireland and go to such places as Cliffs of Moher, King John’s Castle, Newgrange (Irish: Sí an Bhrú) and Our Lady of Knock Shrine. While you are there you can Kiss the Balneary Stone among many other things to do there.
Traveling Through Ever-Changing Ireland | Kristin Wilson (patheos.com)
7. Learn Irish History. When you do you will learn such things as why many Irish people dislike the British Monarchy.
But it’s ok to like British things such as The Beatles, Monty Python, and neat British historical places.
8. Join the Ceilidhe club and learn Ceilidh dancing.
9. Figure out why 26 + 6 = 1.
THE 26 COUNTIES OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND AND 6 COUNTIES OF NORTHERN IRELAND (usc.edu)
10. Watch Irish movies such as The Quiet Man, The Quiet Girl, Darby O’ Gill and the Little People, Leap Year, The Secret of Kells and the Secret of Ronin Inish and
Here is a little more about Darby O’ Gill and the Little People so you can know more about why you should see it and so I can make this post come to the standard length it needs to be. It came out in 1959 and was directed by Robert Stevenson who has directed tons of Disney films such as Old Yeller, The Absent-Minded Professor, Mary Poppins, The Love Bug and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. It is adapted from the Darby O’Gill stories of Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1861 – October 30, 1933) that were published in 1903 and 1926. Just like Roan Inish the tales are based on Irish Mythical creatures and was adapted from the book Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry (1957) by Rosalie K. Fry (April 22, 1911 – 1992).
Here is a rare film indeed.
A kid oriented fantasy movie without any kids in it.
How often due you see that?
It is a fun movie for many reasons.
1. It takes place in Ireland.
2. It has witty and interesting dialog. Most of the fun is watching old-man Darby match wits with the King of the Leprechauns as they continue to each continue to try and outwit the other.
3. It has a pre-bond Sean Connery.
4. It has really good extras on the DVD. It has a ‘World of Disney‘ episode with some added adventures of Darby and the Leprechaun king. Walt Disney is searching for the Leprechaun so he can star in his movie. You learn some more of the myth of the Leprechaun which is Christian in origin.
5. It’s a good and fun fantasy film.
6. It has a beautiful Irish Female in it.
It also lead to the formation of this band.
The only drawback is the on screen depiction of the banshee. It’s just some lame lights and vapors. Not really convincing. But this little wisp of pre-computer effects doesn’t dampen the great special effects that bring the Leprechaun’s to life.
Maybe you can pick up the book. There was a version published by the Catholic book publisher Sophia Press and it is online for free being in the public domain. You can add it to you library and read it to your kids or to yourself. You can then go and search for Leprechauns on your own. I plan on doing that so I can pay off my student loans and have money to take Kristin to Ireland again.
This magical movie deserves a place in your video library next to Disney’s ‘The Gnome Mobile’ also directed by Robert Stevenson.
So I might as well tell you a little bit about this other film with more small mythical magical people. First off the disappointing thing about the Gnome-Mobile is that up until the last 15 minutes of the movie, there are only two gnomes. And even they are not in it as much as you would like. Usually this would make the film suck like a lemon. But the wonderful cast make up for the disappointing lack of Gnomes. It is an environmentalist film, made before the extremists took over.
The lack of gnomes is atoned for in the end when the lone Gnome male bachelor is chased by several single and beautiful gnomes around the woods. They dip him in magic bubbles so he won’t be so easy to catch. It’s a fun romp around the woods. I will most likely never have a group of screaming girls running after me. Probably won’t have any Gnomes chasing after me either.
There is also a great and wonderful car chase which in the end has the same result as a demolition derby. The movie is based on a 1936 book by Upton Sinclair entitled of all things, The gnomobile : a gnice gnew gnarrative with gnonsense, but gnothing gnaughty.
I may have to read it at some point.
11. Go watch live Irish music which is great craic with bands such as Ireland the Band, the Wolftones or the High Kings.
12. Learn to sing Irish songs such as N-17, The Town I loved so Well, The Unicorn Song, Danny Boy and ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma.
Living Irish History Through Song
13. Eat Irish Chief’s sauce with your meat. Steak, Burgers, Irish sausages, and even Mash Potatoes. FYI you don’t have to like corn beef and cabbage.
14. Start a devotion to an Irish Saint in which there are plenty to choose from such as Saint Patrick, Colmcill, Brigid of Kildare and the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. And while not a saint yet, Sister Clare Crockett, an Irish nun who died in the 2016 Ecuador earthquake lead an extremely holy life and may one day be canonized.
All or Nothing: Sr. Clare Crockett – Full Movie
15. Learn how to make a St. Bridget’s Cross.
16. Read Irish poetry and literature.
Oscar Wilde, ‘Requiescat’.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew …
Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment—in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture—had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed.
Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.
Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (2010) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
“What I told you tonight – it isn’t my story alone. It belongs to every Irish person living and dead. And every Irish person living and dead belongs to it. And to all the story of Ireland; blood and bones, legends, guns and dreams, Catholics, Protestants, England, horses and poets and lovers.”
― Ireland
17. Make up your own Limericks.
There once was a girl named Paula.
She wish she was smaller.
One day she shrunk.
And grew a trunk.
Then She wished she was taller.
by Kristin Wilson
18. Eat Taytos and Crunches and Fruit Pastels. Drink Shamrock Farms Milk and put Kerrygold Butter on your bread.
19. Learn to play the tin whistle.
20. Make an Irish shrine in your house somewhere.
–PHOTO COMING-
It’s 1:30 AM and I should go to bed.
21. Go to Mass on St. Patrick’s Day. Even if it is not a Sunday. Preferably at a church named St. Patrick’s.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City.
22. Learn to refute heresy with Donnel and Connell.
23. Listen to Eamon Kelly the Irish Storyteller.
24. Wear Irish jewelry such as clatter ring. This way everyone will know your Irish.
Now that you have done all these things.
Congratulations!
Your Now Irish
and can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a clean conscience.
There’s something about growing up Irish American that settles deep in your bones. I don’t know when I first heard the bodhrán , but there was something in hearing that instrument that thrummed inside me. It was primal. It meant I had to tap my toes
There weren’t peat fires in my soul, but there were forests, and hills, and grass, and stones. There were skirts and tea and wildflowers in my hair.
To be Irish was also to be Catholic. No matter how you covered up your Irishness, how much you hummed “Rule Brittania” – you were also Catholic. Defiantly Catholic. Rebelliously Catholic. You Can Take Our Country, and Starve Us Out, and Kill Our Tongue, and Make Us Flee – but you cannot Take Our Faith Catholic. To be Irish, to be Catholic, was to suffer and endure and sing sad love songs and mad, hopeful songs of war and failure and the glorious Long Defeat. And to beat up your enemies by still being there tomorrow, having reproduced like hell in the meantime. To be Irish, to be Catholic, to be American was to long for a home you’d never seen: in Heaven and on earth. It was to talk as fondly of St. Paddy as it was to talk of your uncle Paddy; and as natural to speak and know the story and shortcomings of both.
So, to all my Irish brothers and sisters, to all my ancestors and those cousins I’ve yet to meet, to those who crossed the ships, and to those who stayed for home, and to those who will come, and those still looking for a way into the fair and Faerie, I say:
Éirinn go Brách
Emily C. A. Snyder LONGING FOR HOME: Being Irish in America (March 17, 2018) Pop Feminist
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