Early on St Patrick’s Day I walked into city via campus. My journey was punctuated by a student dressed in green and white with a vomit festooned an tridhathach (the Irish tricolour). "So", I asked the "unwell" student, "Are you Irish?".
The reply was a garbled impression of the Lucky Stars Leprechaun.
"I’m ‘Irish’ (well Scottish of mixed descent). Don’t you think you are being disrespectful to the flag, there?"
I received a bucket of invective at the end of a drunken rainbow.
Perhaps I should have asked: "If I ran around Dublin on Matariki Day in black face festooned with fake tattoos whilst doing a haka, would you be offended?"
The answer must be yes. That is wrong. Offensive.
Many Irish are irritated by the Americanised St Patrick’s Day. A burgeoning number of Irish across the globe are increasingly antsy with that incoherent leprechaun, the novelty green Chicago River, Riverdance parades and pipers . . . mostly using Scottish, not Irish, pipes.
Hacked off with the view that to celebrate Ireland is to get utterly wrecked and act like an offensive idiot.
The Irish do like a drink. The pub is the centre of the community but the drinking we saw in Dunedin last week? No, that is frowned upon.
There is a comedy name for it: Scottish Drunk, a typical Irish jest that underlines my point: getting offensively wrecked on St Patrick’s Day is an American invention. They celebrate in Cork, Dublin and Belfast but not like that.
What is it like to live with an Irish Traveller surname in Britain? I met no leprechauns nor saw buckets of gold under every rainbow. Just experienced systematic abuse.
At school, terms such as gippo and pikey abounded. I never knew why. With age I realised the truth: 40 years ago being the last of five children from a Catholic father with the surname Connors, it was natural for parents to tell their kids to avoid me. I was a dirty little traveller child.
Yet my father and his father were not Irish, were military officers and my mother was of Jewish descent with a business. I had no clue what was going on.
However, when friends said their parents wouldn’t let me come and play with them, I was just sad and hurt. I wasn’t Irish. Or a traveller. My parents just couldn’t figure out contraception.
Where do Irish travellers come from? Ireland was colonised by the English. We are descended from clans kicked off the land for Protestant settlers. Catholics were denied the vote until 1829, and well in the 1960s discrimination and anger led to a two-decade-long civil war in Northern Ireland which spilled into British cities.
Why did so many Irish travel to the US, Canada or Australia? They lost everything and had nowhere to go. Perhaps predominantly Scottish, English and Protestant New Zealand may not have experienced this to the same extent, but remember, those Irish that built America also built Otago and Dunedin during the Gold Rush in the 1860s.
The wrecked students on St Patrick’s Day (Not Paddy’s, that is an abusive term) know none of this. That’s the advantage of being young.
At their age in the mid-1990s, at university in Manchester and Amsterdam at the height of the dance music epoch, we also drank to excess (sometimes with additional assistance) and as members of the Transporting Generation, were far cooler. At Mulligan’s on Amstel, a famous Dutch music venue, watching the Dubliners play I could be immensely drunk, too.
There is a boundary when good-natured partying becomes offensive and insensitive. On Monday, caught up in the ubiquitous local culture of conformity and groupthink university students crossed that line.
The university and those responsible for student conduct need to reflect on their behaviour, because Ireland and the Irish should be recognised for giving so much to the modern world in the face of extreme adversity not lampooned as drunken louts.
They — we — deserve far better than that.
• Duncan Connors is a former University of Otago academic.
