Why do lots of cities in the world celebrate St. Patrick's Day?

[Kendodd]

I think it's great btw. I'm very much in the 'celebrate everything' camp. Tokyo can't have a significant Irish population though?

BBC News - St Patrick's Day celebrations take place across the world
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-68590398

I think the 'English' word for Genocide is famine.

Spot on 👍

I have sat through it I have also met Michael Flatley on a number of occasions. I blame Riverdance for him.

I'm irish & in my 50s & I definitely went to St Patrick's Day Parades in my childhood- they were a thing then too. Not on the scale of today but I definitely remember floats being pulled along by tractors!!

Ha. You would be lynched in a certain Cork village for dissing Riverdance. My mum and aunt loved it. You can understand why - they grew up when the only Irish culture British people were exposed to was shamrockery like Finian's Rainbow.or songs about goats.

Of course it is a bit ' coffee table '. Cleaned up coz the neighbours are visiting. But I wouldn't call it a stomp fest.

I think it's great that the entire world is celebrating the life of a Welshman.

Yes I was just going to say there was no famine. The potato crop failed but there was plenty of food. It was just all exported to Britain.

Don't conflate famine and genocide.

Its any reason to get shit faced?!

I think that poster’s point was that when a colonial government decides to facilitate mass food export from its colony rather than feed a starving population reliant because of corrupt colonial absentee landlords on a single good crop, that constitutes genocide.

In the US, the Irish diaspora is huge, of course, so that's one reason that many US cities host St. Patrick's Day parades and other celebrations. But in the US, it's also become a sort of annual "immigrants' day." Or as the saying goes "Everyone's Irish on the 17th day of March."

I'm Irish-American on both sides of my family.

That's very clever if true

Nobody knows for sure if he was Welsh

It possibly goes some way towards compensating for all the successful Irish people who are referred to as British in the British media.

He just needed a bit of good PR. Came to the right place eh! How's that other Welsh lad these days , Darren , Dai , Del something?

Hard to imagine what else he could have been though ? Kidnapped by Irish pirates in the early 400s , somewhere on the west coast of Britain. Wrote in Latin albeit not perfect Latin. The Romans had scarpered in 410ad. Sounds about right.

Ireland has a long history of immigration and displacement dating back to the 17th century; the Flight of the Earls in 1605 and the Cromwellian campaign in 1649, to name a few. Fast forward to the genocide between 1845-1852, where approximately 1m emigrated world-wide.
Through forced and voluntary immigration, the Irish diaspora made a monumental contribution to society e.g Admiral William Brown, the father of Argentinian Navy was of Irish ancestry as is Che Guevara.
One of the most famous Irish figures in Mexican history is Guillermo (William) Lamport, an Irishman who attempted to lead a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in the 17th century. Although his rebellion was unsuccessful, Lamport is remembered as an early advocate for Mexican independence.

For such a small island, the contributions of the Irish to society are diverse and far-reaching, spanning various fields such as politics, literature, music, science, and sports. Overall, the contributions of the Irish to society are diverse and multifaceted, reflecting a rich cultural heritage and a spirit of innovation, resilience, and compassion.
What's not to celebrate? You don't need to have Irish ancestry to celebrate a nation who made many significant contributions to the development of society🇮🇪🇮🇪

I come from not far away, and I lived for 25 years in the UK, which still hadn’t quite got past the pigs in the kitchen version of Irishness by the time I left .

(Anyway he’s living in Monte Carlo at the moment, waiting for Castle Hyde to be sorted out, and as he’s sent the young fella to Eton, I don’t think he’s going to integrating fully any time soon. He is, also, an authentically awful man.)

Still, even leaving Flatley aside, still doesn’t mean I need to think that kind of vacuous Irishness for Export stuff is any good. It gives some dancers and musicians a steady job, I suppose, though from what I gather conditions are fairly hohum on the tours. It’s the Irish cultural equivalent of one of those Irish pubs in Bratislava or Bogotá where you buy all the ‘authentic’ furniture and decor, down to the last vintage GAA photo, off the internet.

The version I've always known is that he was from Carlisle.

Ireland is traditionally a Roman Catholic country. RCs revere and venerate saints. Henry VIII and, latterly, Cromwell dispensed with RC and many of its practices. We have a few 'leftover' saints in UK but any celebration of them is fairly muted. It's in very recent history that RC has become acceptable here, probably as a result of the many Irish immigrants looking for work and needing churches for worship. That's why all the RC churches are newish buildings. Anti-Catholic riots were once a regular feature of London life, the last was in 1840 or so I think. We're not a friendly country when difference is encountered. So hurrah that the Irish have exported their celebrations around the world. ☘to all.

While the currently Catholic churches may be newish, many of the older protestant churches were originally catholic and were converted after the tudor split from Rome.

Of course. Didn't think that needed saying.

@Tuathdédanan Such an interesting post! Even as an 'English' person I have been taught some Irish history. I knew that the famine was caused by rich political English figures, which of course started a huge round of emigration. I do think that we need to be taught a great deal more about the history surrounding Ireland and the persecution of Catholics in English schools.

Sometimes I'm very surprised at what needs to be said😁

More Irish people live outside Ireland than in it

What gives you that idea? People of Irish descent, sure, but this would include people with a single Irish ancestor who left Ireland 200 years ago. Would you count someone who had an ancestor on the Mayflower in 1620 as English?