In Ireland and half of New York, Boston, and Chicago, people are off work and out celebrating. Meanwhile in DC, it's business as usual. Sigh...So I've sort of described my first Paddy's Day in Dublin. My second Paddy's Day in the city is a little blurry, but there are parts of it I remember quite clearly. It was 2000, I was living in Ireland at the time, working as an intern for Glencree Center for Reconciliation, a conflict resolution center located about 45 minutes south of Dublin City in the Wicklow Mountains near Enniskerry. As I was the Yank, Claire, the center's facilitator, invited me to hang out with her friends on Paddy's Day, so I arrived at her house about 11am and we headed out to Searson's on Upper Baggott Street, fortunate enough to get a table. A lot of Guinness flowed, and Claire's cell phone drowned in a river of the black stuff that night, dying a happy death.
Now that I think about it, that day was a blur. We sat at Searson's until about six and then went somewhere else, though I'm not sure or can't remember where. But I have a very distinct memory of Claire's friend wearing a tri-color Cat-in-the-Hat hat and posing for a photo for the Irish Times. Thing is, though, that the guy's father was a prominent politician in Ulster for the British side of things, a proud Unionist, and that photo appeared on the front page of the Times the next day. I always wondered what his father had to say about that.
(Photo is of Irish PM Bertie Ahern giving bushie a pot of shamrocks.)
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