I’ll be honest, I can’t quite remember being at a Paddy’s Day parade as a youngster.

My memories are of a very quiet day every year, often bright and sunny, where we’d go to mass and visit grandparents.

Someone would be wearing a fairly withered-looking bunch of watercress on their lapel. No plastic green paraphernalia. Certainly no alcohol.

At some point along the way, we started to put on whatever green item you could find in the house, to go stand in the cold watching a tractor go by with a banner on it.

There might have been a few lads from the GAA club marching behind it. Someone’s auntie probably made Rice Krispie buns.

What I’m saying lads is that it was low key.

Now, I don’t know what Paddy’s Day is anymore. Chicago dyes its river green. Every pub in Sydney has a lad in a leprechaun hat drinking Guinness that was brewed in Nigeria.

Which is hugely conflicting for those of us who have to actually live here, breathe the air and struggle to get on the emerald property ladder. Can Irishness be reduced to a t-shirt of a banshee smoking a shillelagh in Temple Bar or a Spotify playlist called “Celtic Vibes”?

Are we just a marketing event, lads?

This week I was rescued from this cultural malaise by British historian James Hawes who has just written The Shortest History of Ireland, and in it he makes the point that Ireland’s cultural pull isn’t some romantic notion, it’s a historical fact. From the Vikings to the Normans to the Cromwellian settlers, every crowd that arrived on this island intending to conquer it ended up going native within a generation or two. Look what happened to poor Bundee Aki.

The Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 had to actually ban English settlers from speaking Irish, marrying Irish women, using Irish law, and, God forbid, playing hurling. None of it worked. As Hawes puts it, Ireland has “a cultural continuum older than any other in Europe” and it doesn’t need a marketing budget. It just absorbs you like the Borg in Star Trek, as Fachtna might say.

So while the Premier League clubs are flogging shamrock jerseys and some fella in Boston is on his ninth green pint, I’d argue that we don’t need to feel insecure about any of this.

As Mel Robbins would say - “let them”. The culture that turned Norman warlords into Irish chieftains inside a generation isn’t going to be undone by a lad dressed up as a pint on TikTok. Irishness isn’t fragile. If anything, it ate its conquerors.

And it’ll survive a parade.

Jessie Bucks the trend

And speaking of which, it’s been some week for Jessie Buckley, the girl from Killarney who became the first Irish woman ever to win Best Actress at the Oscars. She hugged Paul Mescal, thanked her husband Fred, said she wanted 20,000 more babies with him, and dedicated the whole thing to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. On Mother’s Day, no less!

Her whole family was there too, because Ireland bought them flights. Her uncle and godfather Seán hosted a gathering at the family’s hotel, the Arbutus in Killarney, a place her grandparents set up a hundred years ago. A butcher’s on the high street had a Kerry flag in the window with a picture of Jessie, the Sam Maguire, and an Oscar, reading “Sam’s home!! Oscar is on the way!”

It would be hard to take if Cork hadn’t Cillian Murphy’s Oscar still warm on the mantelpiece…

And fair play to Richard Baneham from Tallaght too, picking up his third Oscar for visual effects on Avatar: Fire and Ash. Only the second Irish citizen after Daniel Day-Lewis to have three of the things. Three!

For what seems like years now, everyone in the know has been reminding us that cinema is dead. Streaming would take over. Theatres would be shuttered. Marvel was churning out a new superhero every six minutes in an effort to stem the flow. Barbenheimer was unleashed to get people queuing for overpriced popcorn again.

But what struck me about this year’s Oscars was the quality and variety of the films vying for the prizes. Sinners, Hamnet, One Battle After Another, KPop Demon Hunters… Hardly the sign of a medium or an art form in decline. If anything, storytelling has never been in safer hands.

The way films get made and paid for is changing, sure, but the stories themselves? They’ll be grand.

Cheering for England

I need to talk about Super Saturday because I’m still not over it. Ireland 43, Scotland 21. A fourth Triple Crown in five years. A performance for the ages.

And then we all had to do the unthinkable. We had to sit down, as a nation, and cheer for England.

For Ireland to win the Six Nations, we needed Steve Borthwick’s lads to do us a favour, and listen, they nearly did.

They were a point up in Paris with minutes to go before Thomas Ramos slotted a penalty to break every Irish heart in the country.

So it was a weekend of unlikely allegiances, in fairness. One night you’re shouting ‘Come on England!’ at the television like some sort of soup-taker, and the next morning you’re celebrating a Kerry woman’s global success. The world might be in bits but these are strange, strange times for Cork people. Take it easy out there folks.