As we all head down to the pub this afternoon with our Guinness hats, it's worth taking a closer look at the concept of celebrating national days in Britain.

Patrick was born in Roman Britain and by the eighth century he had become the patron saint of Ireland, mostly owing to clever propaganda by the monastery of Armagh which claimed to hold his relics. We celebrate St. Patrick's Day on the day he died, 17th March.

The 'festival' is widely celebrated across Irish-populated Western civilisation, including Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. Typically it sees hordes of people walking down streets with a pint of Guinness in-hand generally being loud, but there are some more official celebrations.

For example, in 2005 the Chicago River was dyed Irish green with Fluorescein in 2002, London mayor Ken Livingstone organized an annual Saint Patrick's Day parade which takes place on weekends around the 17th, usually in Trafalgar Square.

And the rest?

Conversely, however, other patron saints' days are not so jubilantly celebrated. Have they been stifled by unbalanced multi-culturalism or do people simply not care?

England's "national day" is St. George's Day which falls on 23rd April. St George was a brave Roman soldier who protested against the Romans' torture of Christians and died for his beliefs. The popularity of St George in England stems from the time of the early Crusades when it is said that the Normans saw him in a vision and were victorious.

However, only one in five people in England know when St. George's Day is, and more than a quarter do not even know who their patron saint is. Indeed, for most of the English St George's is just another day.

Perhaps it is because even before taking into account the diversity of our country today, the English are an incredibly mixed culture stemming from Saxon, Norman and Viking roots. The Irish are almost solely Celtic, lending a possible explanation to why Ireland would have a more largely celebrated national day.

Indeed, according to Michael Coughlan from Ri-Ra (an Irish cultural magazine in London):

It has a lot to do with identity and culture. Irish culture – perpetuated through music, dance and literature – is a very vibrant one.

Young Londoners are attracted to this as many perceive themselves as having no identifiable culture of their own.

More than anything else, the highest concentration of Britain's 14 million citizens claiming Irish ancestry in 2001 is in London where more than three-quarters (77%) claim to have Irish roots.

For whatever reason, you are more likely to see big St Patrick parades in England celebrating Ireland's National Day than you are to see any sign of St George's Day being celebrated. This was certainly true in Manchester in 2003, when St George's Day was virtually ignored soon after the biggest St Patrick's Day Celebrations in the city's history.

The effect of an imbalanced culture
Those English people who are more patriotic than most sometimes feel outdone by all this. A guy on one of my email lists replied somewhat brazenly to a greeting card sent out by another list member:

No thanks, I'm English and don't celebrate St Patrick's Day.

I'm just fed up with the Irish being allowed to celebrate St Patrick's day in London when the English aren't allowed to celebrate St George's Day. And I don't recall anyone sending out greetings for St David's Day at the start of March.

What's so flipping special about St Patrick's Day, especially for the non-Irish?

Whilst my research hasn't shown up much about specific rules prohibiting the celebration of St. George's Day in London, it is clear that the Political Correctness rules currently favoured by our society places some rather unfair restrictions on just how patriotic multi-cultural England is 'allowed' to be.

A comment sent in to one cultural database website describes a fairly brash example of reverse discrimination at work:

My wife is a teacher and I work in British schools and universities.

In my wife's school which is in London, with a large number of [foreign language] students and a small minority of white kids, kids are not allowed to discuss or celebrate St. George's day, or wear England Football shirts during P.E. (sport) or any T-shirt with a Cross of St. George or a Union Flag. [But] the shirts of English football teams are allowed as are the national strips of other countries.

The school's reason is that overt signs of 'Englishness' could cause offence.

In the past, people have been ordered to remove English flags from the sides of their houses for fear of offending those who are not English. Whitehall has a fairly comprehensive set of rules governing just how patriotic anyone's allowed to be: chanting "God Save Our Queen" in the streets brands one as at least racist and at worst a supporter of the BNP bent on ethnic cleansing.

Of course, the government wouldn't dare stifle the celebration of other cultures' holidays. For example, although Christmas still vastly overwhelms Hanukkah and Eid, the former is often attacked — perhaps rightly — for being a commercialised bastardisation of a religious festival (albeit stolen from the Pagans), whereas anyone caught saying a bad word about the Muslim festival of Eid is almost stoned on the spot. Only the English can be racist.

The only notable exception to these problems is around World Cup time when thousands upon thousands of football fans (and those who barely care alike) plaster their cars with English flags and display banners in their windows. Supposedly the mass jubilation of an entire nation is a little harder to silence than the occasional media-reported incident.

Rant over

But anyway. The point is, the Irish national day is celebrated far more actively even in England than the English national day and it's not entirely clear why. Supposedly the number of parades and festivities across the country on 23rd April has been on the rise in recent years, but then again 17th March celebrations don't show many signs of slowing down.

Isn't it curious that the country in Britain most vested in force-moulding a mixed culture has ended up with no identity whilst its neighbours enjoy a care-free public holiday and much beer?

I'm all for internationals making roots here, believe me — if it weren't for international students at University the last two years of my life would have been very different — but all this does raise interesting questions such as just how effective can Government's cultural policies really be at promoting unity? Perhaps we should be going about integration differently.

Discuss.