It’s St. Patrick’s Day today and my head is full of literary and musical associations of the sort that the Irish and their songs and history engender. And they in turn trigger certain reflections.
But this year, it’s a strange and rather subdued Paddy’s day for many of us. Here in Kyiv, due to the quarantine imposed to fend off the pressure on Guinness posed by the deadly “corona” mutant, pubs and restaurants are closed and we have to celebrate at home.
And this eerie experience is repeated in Italy, France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Even in New York, where rivers of green beer usually flow from the taps on this hallowed day, the watering holes are closed and the streets strangely empty.
Here in Kyiv, the capital of a land whose inhabitants, particularly the traditionally Catholic part in the west, have earlier been called “the Irish of the East,” we sorely miss our own latter-day St. Patrick. The patron saint of Ireland is a construct of legends, and perhaps the most famous one is that he drove the snakes out of the country.
Ireland never had snakes – but the snake metaphor was probably used later to represent paganism. And in today’s Ukraine, there is no shortage of candidates to fit the metaphor – greedy oligarchs, bandits and corrupt officials, collaborators and traitors, and cynical scoundrels hiding behind the masks of patriots.
At least on this particular St. Patrick’s Day history has been made in Ukraine. For the first time in its history, a woman, Iryna Venediktova, a legal specialist from Kharkiv, has been appointed the country’s general prosecutor. She has the unenviable task of ridding the country of serpents and vermin – doing for Ukraine what St. Patrick did proverbially for Ireland. Mission impossible?
Just as that great Irish writer Samuel Becket once brilliantly depicted the torment of endlessly waiting for a savior-figure in his “Waiting for Godot,” almost 30 years after achieving independence Ukrainians are still awaiting their own political wizard capable of leading them into the promised land. Moses and St. Patrick all in one. For Ukraine’s greatest poet Taras Shevchenko this liberating figure was represented by George Washington.
Incidentally, from what little we know, or is supposed about St. Patrick, he and Shevchenko had at least something in common. Both spent their early years in slavery or serfdom, and both fell in love with the lands where they were formed, resisting oppression both spiritually and existentially. Both became determined to offer those around them an alternative, and a vision of emancipation, religious in one case, and national in the other.
St. Patrick was not even Irish, it appears, but the offspring of Romans living in Britain. Carried off to Ireland by pirates, he fell in love with the land, mastered its Gaelic language and returned as a Christian missionary. For today’s Ukraine, seeking to build a tolerant political nation, in which the majority ethnic Ukrainians and national minorities are to live in unity and harmony, this is a worthy example to reflect on.
And one other thing about St. Patrick and parallels with Ukraine. It was he that made shamrock as synonymous with Ireland as the trident has become with Ukraine. According to legend, St. Patrick used a three-leaved shamrock to explain the idea of the Trinity, that in the one God there are three divine beings: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
We still don’t know where the trident – or tryzub – came from, but this three-pronged emblem derived from the age of Kyivan Rus serves as the national symbol of Ukraine. A three-in-one symbol is shared by the two nations.
Both nations are now free but their birth as independent states was difficult. In the conclusion to my book “The Ukrainian Resurgence” published in London and Toronto in 1999, I wrote: “Recalling W.B. Yeat’s description of Ireland’s experience 80 years earlier, Ukraine was certainly not the first “terrible beauty” to be born.
Ireland and Ukraine had to deal with former colonial masters who were reluctant to relinquish their hold. Ukraine has had to withstand the pressures of Russification for centuries; Ireland the colossal pressure of Britain imposing its language and ways. And yet the Irish showed that they could remain patriots even when their native language was effectively marginalized and overridden. Their modern cultural representatives made of the enemy language a weapon with which to fight for their freedom.
Later, supporters of an independent Ireland regarded Northern Ireland as an artificially created majority-Protestant enclave occupied by Britain. Ukrainians, facing their analogous conflict with Russia in eastern Donbas, should be aware that it took 30 years for a peaceful settlement to be reached in the case of Northern Ireland.
Last, but not least, Ireland is undoubtedly a country that has produced great poets who have stimulated thought about what is to be Irish in a modern world and how to relate the past to the present and future.
And Ukraine’s greatest living poet, Lina Kostenko, who turns 90 on March 19, is in that league and has done the same for her people. She has ensured that at the opposite ends of Europe, Ireland and Ukraine have remained beacons of European culture and freedom.
