Like Pagans for Chocolate
The state of St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland.

By David Quinn, columnist with The Sunday Times (Ireland edition)
March 17-18, 2001

he movie Chocolat is set in France in 1960 but might as well have been set in Ireland. The lovely Vianne arrives in a

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small town with her daughter at the beginning of Lent to open a chocolate shop right opposite the church in the town square. The stage is set for a showdown between Vianne's message of self-indulgence and liberation and the Church's one of self-denial. Guess who wins?

By the end of the film even the local priest and the arch-reactionary Comte de Reynaud have been won over. On Easter Sunday Vianne throws a party in the town square complete with street performers. Everyone turns up and her victory is complete.

Take a look at a St. Patrick's Day parade in Ireland today and you'll see the mark of Vianne all over it. Forget the Church — it's street performers as far as the eye can see. St. Patrick puts in an appearance alright, but he has been turned into a kind of sanitized Santa Claus, smiling, bland and inoffensive, a bit like the priest in Chocolat come to think of it. Christianity is allowed to put in a cameo appearance, just so long as it doesn't play the party-pooper.

What has happened to the parades in recent years has an element of the gratuitous about it. Some of the floats and acts simply flaunt their paganism. These are intentional throwbacks to Ireland's pre-Christian Celtic past, a past when, apparently, we lived in harmony with one another, in harmony with nature, and had great sex all the time. Then Christianity came along with its message of self-denial and repression and ruined everything for about 1,500 years. Taking over St. Patrick's Day is the pagans way of saying "we're back, it's time to party."

A few years back, the Labour-dominated coalition government drove home the point. The government was asked by the locals to repair the battered, time-worn statue of St. Patrick on the Hill of Tara overlooking the site of the old pagan High Kings of Ireland. St. Patrick knew if he could convert those High Kings, he could convert Ireland. He did, of course, and the statue of St. Patrick at Tara symbolizes this.

But the government decided to pull a fast one. It said it wouldn't repair the old statue. Instead it would replace it. And it wouldn't replace it with a statue bearing the remotest resemblance to St. Patrick as traditionally depicted. Oh no. The St. Patrick the government had in mind was a shaven-headed youth, wearing a tunic and skirt, and carrying in one hand a bell and in the other a staff topped by antlers, a pagan symbol of magic.

What more fitting way could there be of demonstrating that the fun-loving, self-actualized, sexually fulfilled pagans were back in town, and that the killjoy Christians had been sent packing?

Thankfully, Tara's local yokels got wise to what was going on. They turned down the government's proposal flat and after a long search were offered a traditional statue of St. Patrick by a group of nuns to replace their beloved old one.

The Tara story illustrates how assidiously elite opinion in Ireland is trying to reshape Irish identity and to edit Christianity out of it. And they have had considerable success. Our Christian past is today regarded by many people as something of an embarrassment, at best, and a long and wicked interregnum between the old paganism and the new, at worst. A politician will rarely let the "God" word slip his lips; some bishops talk more like sociologists than, well, bishops.

As for Ireland's young, in the main they're doing some serious partying — really serious. Ireland is now the official binge-drinking capital of Europe, and the bingeing begins at a younger age than anywhere else in Europe. Vianne has won the day alright, but the people of Ireland are over-indulging it seems.

This puts me in mind of a sequel to Chocolat. I'll call it Chocolat II: The Revenge. It's the beginning of Lent once again. Five years have passed since Vianne's triumph. The local church is now closed and disused and the chocolate shop has the town square all to itself.

But the townsfolk have become too fond of their chocolate and have all, Vianne included, grown enormously fat. Learning of this, a young priest decides to come to the town and re-open the church. He preaches the message that sometimes a little self-denial is good for you. One by one the people of the town begin to listen. They lose weight, and seeing the benefits of self-denial, even Vianne takes heed. She decides that total self-indulgence is no more the secret of human happiness than total self-denial.

Ireland has lived through Chocolat I. In a few years time, hopefully, we'll get around to Chocolat II.