As Winter ends and Spring begins, with Lent underway, St. Patrick’s Day arrives.

“Everybody is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day,” goes the saying. Who are they, then– the Irish?

If grandparents from Cork make one Irish, I’m Irish. If curly hair, freckles, a Donegal tweed hat and a blackthorn walking stick make one Irish, I’m Irish. If loving the woods, the ocean, the mountains, all of creation, one’s faith, and delighting in the written and spoken word and music and whiskey and stout make one Irish, I’m Irish.

If one’s people have been despised, starved, and disenfranchised in their own land and then despised where they sought refuge, I’ll call that Irish.

If your people have a history of prejudice and xenophobia, that’s Irish.

St. Patrick’s is a day to remember, educate, and celebrate.

Bushmills was long the Irish whiskey of choice in my family, before Jameson became ubiquitous. We then learned of Bushmills reputation as a Loyalist brand, and long shunned it, but Bushmills is Irish, is it not? As Irish as those of any part of Ireland are Irish. What people call themselves is one thing, but Ireland is one place, and its people, one people. Subject to deadliest dispute, of course, but, as humans are entitled to claim all the universe as our own, so we Irish can claim all Ireland as our own, as the Irish flag claims orange.

Abraham had this coversation with God. Would not God spare Sodom if even ten righteous men lived there? Had that conversation gone a little further, I think God would have spared Sodom if just one righteous man was there. Let me, then, not condemn Bushmills if one righteous man works there. That possibility exists as long as I cannot say for sure that is not the case, and I am not the guy in the position to decide such things.

Long ago, my grandparents and all their people lived in Ireland. Those grandparents were among the millions who emigrated, under duress, to the United States. But as a family we remember where we came from, as Christians in the human family remember Adam and Eve’s Eden. Mistakes were made, In Eden, Ireland, and every elsewhere, but even as we deservedly  sit in sackcloth and ashes, we celebrate the positive, glad to walk in woods full of streams and birdsong, to read Ulysses, A Pagan Place, Synge, Beckett, Wilde, Yeats, to listen to Rory Gallagher, Sinead O’Connor, Thin Lizzy, Stiff Little Fingers, Van Morrison, U2, My Bloody Valentine, The Chieftains, The Undertones, to drink in Irish pubs, shouting over the uillean pipes, fiddles, tin whistles and bodhrans, to eat corned beef, potatoes and cabbage, to drink Guinness, Jameson, Harp, Bailey’s, Murphy’s, Smithwick’s, to cheer on the Irish football team, glad to wear green, thankful for all our terrible beauty, glad to be Irish, glad to be human, glad to be alive!