Green with envy
Posted 17 March 2009 // Jock Phillips
Time for a revival of morris dancing?
Today, on St Patrick’s Day, I wish my Irish mates good cheer, and praise their energy and old-country loyalty in keeping the day alive in New Zealand.
But, where are our English and Scottish mates, who between them constituted over three-quarters of New Zealand’s Pākehā? How come March 17 is a widely recognised annual ritual, but 23 April (St George’s Day) and November 30 (St Andrew’s Day) is not?
There was a time, before the First World War, when the banks closed and lawyers had a holiday on these days; but there was never much public interest. Papers Past – that wonderful treasure trove of 19th century newspapers – has only 13 search results for St George’s Day, and 126 for St Andrew’s Day; but 222 for St Patrick’s Day.
For a time, Scottish sawmillers in Canterbury celebrated St Andrew’s Day, and the trains in Otago offered cheap return fares – primarily to allow people to attend Caledonian sports. But such celebrations died out by the 1920s; while St George’s Day, which was always much weaker in its observance, may have been finally killed by its proximity to Anzac Day.
But St Patrick’s Day, which featured large crowds attending sports and watching processions in the late 19th century, has undergone an impressive revival in the last 20 years. The beer has flowed green, there have been processions through towns, and few people are unaware that today is for the Irish.
Why the difference, you ask? Perhaps it is just that us Scots and English are a lazy phlegmatic lot. Perhaps it is that because we were so long in a majority we felt little need to celebrate our heritage – and, anyway, with Empire Day, and then Queen’s Birthday, our imperial heritage was commemorated. Another factor was that over half the Irish were Roman Catholic, and the object of considerable suspicion. St Patrick’s Day was a way expressing some pride in the Irish cause.
But when we look at the way the Chinese celebrate the Chinese New Year, the Hindu community holds their festival of lights (Diwali), the Pacific community has their Pasifika festival, and Māori are reviving Matariki (Māori New Year), surely us stick-in-the mud Anglo-Saxons should get off our butts and celebrate our heritage. A bit of morris dancing would do us all a power of good!
I went to a school called St George’s in Wanganui and we celebrated St George’s Day for obvious reasons! I’m now considering it a rare ‘privlege’!
Just a Te Ara historical aside: Jock’s entry on the Irish was the first piece written for Te Ara. It provided the testing ground and prototype when we designed the website, and went out to tender way back in 2002. It was the guinea-pig entry we cut our editorial and resourceful teeth on. It has held up well, and bears no scars of all those amputations, alterations, incisions, grafts and transplants it suffered as we refined the approach we would take to building the rest of the encyclopedia.