St Patrick's day

I"ve always been a bit ambivalent about St Patrick's Day It seems another chance to reduce a large, complex mass of humanity to a simple bunch of mindless cliches. You know the kind of thing;

The Irish are ...... (add the insult/attribute of your choice).

As if four (?) million odd people all thought and acted in exactly the same way. Of course the annoying thing is that people have this horrible habit of thinking for themselves and not just following the "national blueprint". The more you get to know people as people, the more you realise how little nationality plays a role in their psychological make - up.

I happen to be half - Irish and when I was young I was lucky enough to spend my summer holidays in Tipperary on my grandmother's farm so I got to know a lot about the people there. I still for the life of me cannot reduce them to a single, easily formulated category. I find that those who can often have only the vaguest idea about what they're talking about.