'It's Not All Green Beer': What St. Patrick's Day Means to Boston's Irish Descendants

Boston, MA - Doyle's Cafe owner Gerry Burke remembers when St. Patrick's Day in Boston wasn't about packing bar stools full of green-shirted customers awash in beer to match. He remembers when it wasn't so... well, commercial.

To be clear, he isn't Charlie Brown wailing "Good grief!" over a Christmas tree. Burke enjoys the historic Jamaica Plain pub's busiest day of the year just like everyone else. But he's also part of a cadre of Irish descendants for whom the holiday has a more personal meaning.

Burke, who took over the family restaurant/bar in 2005, doesn't remember the St. Patty's Day fervor hitting this pitch until the late 1980s, when Doyle's added a third room. Before then, he doesn't even remember opening on March 17.

What he does remember is visiting his grandparents' Jamaica Plain home as a kid. They'd eat corned beef and cabbage, and "tell tales about how things were, what it was like," he said.

Another thing he doesn't remember -- "We never drank green beer."

Boston Police officer Jim Barry still celebrates much the same way. And for him, it also comes back to memory.

"It's a day I reflect on my Irish-ness," said Barry, a Dorchester native whose half-Irish roots mix with Scottish and German.

Barry is president and founder of the Boston Police Gaelic Column of Pipes and Drums, which held its first meeting at Doyle's some 23 years ago. He's the drum major in the center of the ring above (the guy in the big hat).

For the past two-plus decades, Barry has kickstarted the holiday by leading his band of pipers and drummers through Franciscan Children's, a rehabilitation hospital in Brighton. At night, he keeps with tradition, eating a "boiled dinner" of vegetables and corned beef. He'll indulge in a pint or two of Guinness, and perhaps listen to Irish music.

But more than the trappings of the drum and pipe performance or the evening meal, Barry says the real tradition of the day is reminiscence. His heritage casts a a complicated reflection.

It's a history that goes back thousands of years, brought into relief by Barry's own experiences visiting the places his grandfather walked, praying over family graves and attending St. Patrick's Day services.

"It's not all green beer over there," he said. "Over there, it's a high holy day."

There's also the more immediate history of Irish immigrants' persecution in Boston. In the 1850s, an anti-immigrant wave of politicians campaigned to "Americanize America," forcibly deporting more than 1,300 Irish poor and seeking literacy tests and long-term residency requirements at the ballot. The story of Barry's family journey to the US includes one known illegal immigration from Ireland. Those memories inflect his feelings when politicians today decry illegal aliens or campaign to bar certain immigrants from entering the country.

It's that living connection to history and heritage that Barry think gets a little lost in the boozy crowds.

"It does give us that reminder of where we came from," he said. "It's important."

>> Photo courtesy Mike Ball, Sarah Nichols via Flickr/Creative Commons