Hail ambiguous St Patrick: sounds of Ireland on parade in Birmingham

Abstract

Birmingham's St Patrick's Day parade claims to be the largest of such events in the UK and the third best attended in the world. Despite resorting to universal advertising proclamations that for one day ‘everyone is a little bit Irish’, this annual march continues to foster the unique musical character of the local diaspora; a metanarrative for the wider, fractious journey of the Irish community into the West Midlands over the past sixty years. This paper examines the primary event in Birmingham's calendar by way of the sounds of the spectacle, considering the musical display that is presented in the processional mode to a static audience sharing city-centre streets one Sunday morning every March. By engaging with the theories on performance of Domenico Pietropaolo, Mikhail Bakhtin and Stephen Greenblatt, this paper argues that it is in the audible space of the parade that Birmingham creates Breda Gray's Ireland ‘of global flows’.

Keywords:

• procession
• Birmingham
• urban soundscape
• spectacle

Notes

 1. Limbrick, A Great Day, 90.

 2. 10,000 March in Historic City March'. Birmingham Gazette. 17 March 1952, 5.

 3. The organisers of the London parade were inspired by Birmingham's example, although the parade there began forty-five minutes later only because it followed rather than preceded a St Patrick's Mass. See O'Flynn, The Irishness of Irish Music, 84.

 4. De Valera addressed a crowd in Galway on 29 August 1951, presenting the findings of Maurice Foley who had investigated the Irish in Birmingham commissioned by the Young Christian Workers Association. See Delaney, The Irish in Post-war Britain, 23.

 5. Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham 1830–1970’, 255.

 6. Cronin and Adair, The Wearing of the Green.

 7. Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy's”’, 567.

 8. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 123.

 9. The Holy Family Catholic Church in Small Heath and St Gerard's Catholic School in Castle Vale were targeted, for instance. Lorries for Gallagher's building company were burnt. English employees at the Longbridge car factory staged a mass walk-out and stall-holders at the city centre's fruit and vegetable markets refused to handle Irish produce. See Moran, Irish Birmingham, 197–204.

10. Limbrick, A Great Day, 44.

11. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 126.

12. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 135.

13. Denvir, The Irish in Britain from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Parnell, 415.

14. There was no 1941 census because of the war. Census of England and Wales, 1921, County of Warwick (London: HMSO, 1923), 56. Census of England and Wales 1931, General Tables: Comprising Population, Institutions, Ages and Marital Conditions, Birthplace and Nationality, Welsh Language (London: HMSO, 1935), 213. Census of England and Wales 1951, County Report, Warwickshire (London: HMSO, 1954), 52. Census of England and Wales 1961, County Report, Warwickshire (London: HMSO, 1963), 20.

15. Two race riots involving members of the black and Asian communities occurred in the Handsworth area of Birmingham in July 1981 and in September 1985. The Sikh community protested about Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti (Dishonour) at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in December 2004.

16. Corporate Statistician, ‘The Nationality of Children Born in 1964’, Table 11, and ‘Trends, the Nationality of Children Born in 1965’.

17. Davies, ‘The Flow is Slowing Down’, 10.

18. In parades from the 1960s, Birmingham's Miss Ireland would lead the procession flanked by four Aer Lingus air hostesses. The Birmingham Rose of Tralee is often something of her equivalent in modern parades, drawn from the Rose of Tralee annual carnival queen festival held in County Kerry. Birmingham, London and New York were the only three non-Irish cities represented at the first competition in 1959.

19. Kennedy, ‘Lá le Padraig at Home and Abroad’, 7.

20. Lennon, McAdam, and O'Brien, Across the Water, 9.

21. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 123.

22. For St Patrick's celebrations in 2007, the illustrious Selfridges exterior was coloured with green lighting. This image is used for the front cover of Moran's Irish Birmingham.

23. ‘80,000 Flock to Birmingham's St Patrick's Day Parade’.

24. According to the census of 2001, Birmingham boasts 28,933 Irish-born residents, more than two-and-a-half times the proportion of Irish-born residents than the average for the rest of England, and 31,467 people in the city claim that they belong to the Irish ethnic group. See Birmingham City Council, Cultural Background: 2001 Population Census, Tables 2.11 and 3.1.

25. The intention of the Mass at the first returning St Patrick's parade in 1996 was peace in Ireland. The message of peace may have been especially promoted at the 1998 parade, which occurred on the eve of the historic Good Friday Agreement in Stormont.

26. Turner, ‘Images and Reflections’, 22.

27. Cronin and Adair, The Wearing of the Green, 1.

28. Moran, Irish Birmingham, 8.

29. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity.

30. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism; Davis, ‘Time, Place and Memory’. 71–88.

31. Liverpool hosted the 12 July Orange Order marches until the late 1960s, for example, and Dublin's disastrous ‘Love Ulster’ march commemorating the unionist victims of the ‘Troubles’ descended into chaos in 2006.

32. See, for example, Kelton, ‘New York City St Patrick's Day Parade’, 93–105, which considers the crowd only in terms of their dress during a brief concluding section; or Carson, ‘“Whole New Worlds”’, 228–35, in which the audience move and the performers are stationary.

33. Pietropaolo, ‘Spectacular Literacy and the Topology of Significance’, 361.

34. Formed in O'Donohue's Bar, Dublin, in 1962, The Dubliners are a five-piece traditional music band with a large mainstream following in Ireland and Britain.

35. Weagel, Words and Music, 110.

36. The lambeg drum is a large drum beaten with curved malacca canes and associated with the unionist marches in Northern Ireland. The bodhrán is associated generally with Irish traditional music and often has nationalistic undertones.

37. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World.

38. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 10, 107.

39. Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy's”’, 567.

40. Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy's”’, 570.

41. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 61, 46.

42. The shootings of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis in Lozells in 2003 were connected to rivalries between two hip-hop groups in Birmingham. See Jones, ‘Rap Music Feud behind Gun Violence in Birmingham’.

43. The statement was made by Birmingham's ‘official’ St Patrick, Englishman Len Cale, and included in the Birmingham Irish Community Forum's St Patrick's Parade Video 1999.

44. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 217–51.

45. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 28.

46. ‘Winds of Change at St Patrick's Festival’, 35.

47. Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy's”’, 571.

48. Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy's”’

49. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 63.

50. Stern and Henderson, Performance, 123.

51. Walter, ‘Celebrations of Irishness in Britain’, 195.

52. Limbrick, A Great Day, 24.

53. Limbrick, A Great Day

54. ‘Birmingham All Set for Big Parade’, 32.

55. Limbrick, A Great Day, 56.

56. Chinn, Birmingham Irish.

57. Chinn, Birmingham Irish, 171.

58. Stokes, ‘Introduction’, 9.

59. Moran, Irish Birmingham, 176.

60. Limbrick, A Great Day, 89.

61. These bands were the O'Neill Pipe Band from Monaghan, the Castlerea Brass Band for Roscommon, and the Buncrana Accordion Band from Donegal.

62. ‘Kelly the Boy from Killan’ features the United Irishman leader John Kelly, who was hanged by British soldiers in 1798. ‘The Rising of the Moon’ recounts a battle between the United Irishmen and the British army during the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

63. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 124.

64. Walter, ‘Celebrations of Irishness in Britain’, 202.

65. The English political leader Oliver Cromwell waged a brutal military campaign in Ireland from 1649.

66. These were St Mary's Girls Pipe Band and Victoria St Pipe Band. For a full account of the Birmingham parade line-up from 1970, see ‘Big Plans for St Patrick's Day Parade and Ceili’, 5.

67. O'Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, 18.

68. Swanson, ‘Wonderful Work Sam’.

69. Pete St John's ballad ‘The Fields of Athenry’ is set during the Great Irish Famine. It is sung by supporters of Celtic Football Club, the Republic of Ireland football team and Ireland's rugby union. ‘Molly Malone’, first published in Massachusetts in the nineteenth century, is something of an anthem for Dublin's ‘fair city’. Ernest Ball set the lyrics of Chauncey Olcott and George Graff Jr's romantic tribute ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ to music in 1912. It was an immediate hit amongst the diaspora in Britain and the USA.

70. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 122–3.

71. In the weeks following the parade the video was shown on the South Birmingham College homepage, www.sbc.ac.uk (accessed 1 April 2009).

72. Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics have claimed ownership of the St Patrick's Day parades in New York throughout its history. See Kelton, ‘New York City St Patrick's Day Parade’, 93–105. Protestant ‘Orange’ marches take place across Northern Ireland on 12 July, whilst the equivalent Grand Orange Lodge of England parades in Liverpool and London. Parades remain sectarian in areas of Scotland. See Walter, ‘Celebrations of Irishness in Britain’, 203.

73. Nagle, ‘“Everybody is Irish on St Paddy's”’, 568.

74. Gray, ‘The Irish Diaspora’, 135.

75. Molloy, ‘“The Sigh of the Harp Shall be Sent O'er the Deep”’, 128.

76. Moore, ‘A Prefatory Letter to the Marchioness Dowager of D’.

77. Campbell, ‘Thomas Moore's Wild Song’, 84.

78. Leland Lyons, ‘Review of James W. Flannery, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, in the Irish Times, December 1976, is quoted in Foster, The Irish Story, 40.

79. Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 64.

80. Limbrick, A Great Day, 49.

81. ‘Genesis of a Folksinger/Songwriter’.

82. Chinn, Birmingham Irish, 20.

83 When the Republic of Ireland national team reached its first World Cup football finals in 1990, Irish fans sang Timothy Sullivan's republican ‘God Save Ireland’ with new lyrics of support for their English manager Jack Charlton: ‘We're all part of Jackie's army, we're all off to Italy’. Since this time, the most famous song at Villa Park has been a setting of the traditional Irish melody the ‘Wild Rover’, with the words, ‘And it's Aston Villa, Aston Villa FC, we're by far the greatest team, the world has ever seen’. Variations of this song have since been taken up by the supporters of many English football clubs. Although evidence on football chants is anecdotal (and contested), claims that this song originated at Villa Park are substantiated by the websites Football Jokes (http://www.footballjokes.co.uk/songschants/miscellaneous.html) and Pie and Bovril (http://www.pieandbovril.com/forum/index.php/topic/124703-crap-football-songs/page__st__25) (accessed 10 February 2012).