March 16, 2008
Another Saint Patrick's Day is here, with its tacky kegs of green beer, leprechauns, lucky charms, fake plastic hats and all imaginable variety of gaudy faux-Irish...um..."charm."
But it needn't be so. The holiday offers up an incredible opportunity to expose children (and adults, of course) to the history of struggle of a courageous people -- England's first and last colony -- and, by extension, to shed light on the legacy of colonization and imperialism and the universal nature of popular resistance.
1 comment:
Thank you for this article. As a person of mostly Irish descent (FitzGerald and Croghan) I am heartily sick of the beer-guzzling stereotypes of the Irish. There is a reason Irish songs all have an undercurrent of sadness in them - and the 'struggles' and the history (potato famines etc) along with the use of the country as a punching ball needs to be explored and recognized, and Daniel Patrick Welch so aptly describes.
Again, thank you.
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