Random, belated St. Paddy's Day reflections

Well it is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen:
My father, he was Orange, and me mother, she was Green.
--Irish folk song

Sorry this is so late in coming, but hey, if the Catholic Church can change the date of St. Patrick's Day to avoid conflicting with Holy Week, then so can I.

**One of the fascinating things about New York City to me has always been not only how many Irish pubs there are, but how many still seem to be run -- or at least staffed -- by genuine Irish people. I'm fully aware of the extent of the Irish diaspora, but you'd think we would have assimilated by now. Did all these pubs just snatch up the last wave of pre-Celtic Tiger immigrants, or is there something more Disney/Epcot Center-y going on here? Does anybody know?

**Jeremy Grunert of CMC fame, now studying abroad in Belfast, has a fun blog documenting his adventures. Particularly interesting is this post, in which his Catholic Northern Irish roommates tell him the story of the "Troubles" of 1968-98 -- and teach him to stereotype the Orange-folk in the process.

**There were "Troubles," of course, long before the latest (last?) round began in '68, but it took my own visit to London two summers ago for me to realize just how fresh in everyone's memories they still are. I was staying with some Irish priests at the time, and, incidentally, reading Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs for leisure. Churchill relates his frustration, in the early war years, with the stubborn unhelpfulness of the neutral Irish government -- though thanks to the aforementioned diaspora, I was fascinated to learn, he typically went through Roosevelt to get whatever cooperation he could.

And yet, some of the names Churchill was using were unfamiliar to me. So I pulled aside one of the priests and asked in all innocence, "Fr. Martin, who was Eamon De Valera?" Two hours and several pints of cider later, I had my answer.

**It turns out that Churchill was heavily involved in negotiating a settlement for Irish Home Rule before and after WWI, too. In any case, as a Catholic anglophile with joint ancenstry and ecumenical tendencies (i.e., a mutt), I couldn't help but be fascinated with the history (I wound up devoting a good deal of my thesis to Churchill and the Irish question).

One short vignette: Churchill was a negotiator at the 1921 peace conference that laid the foundation for the Irish Free State. Opposite him was Michael Collins, the young and passionate IRA military commander, and soon to be De Valera's bitter enemy in the Irish Civil War. As Churchill tells it, the two of them were one night alone together in Churchill's London apartment, with Collins seething at all manner of past British injustice -- most presently, the 5,000-pound bounty on his head. Churchill responded by fetching a framed reward poster from his own days as an escaped prisoner of war in South Africa. The bounty: 25 pounds.

"He read the paper," Churchill later recounted, "and as he took it in he broke into a hearty laugh. All his irritation vanished. We had a really serviceable conversation, and thereafter…we never to the best of my belief lost the basis of a common understanding."

Lesson: There's nothing like the mutual experience of getting shot at to bring people together.

**Except for maybe a pitcher of cold green beer.