An Irish Tale told by Donna Carton

ON a cold December day in 1963, I prematurely made my way into the world in a hospital in Derry city in the north west of Ireland.
I was the first born to Beatrice and Terry Carton who had married only ten months earlier.
Just six years and three more babies later, their world would begin to change as the rumblings of political discontent from a disenfranchised, discriminated against, angry part of the population, erupted onto the streets in civil rights marches and vociferous equality demands.
Sadly, those voices were silenced with bullets on what the world now knows as Bloody Sunday and elements eager to make their political struggle a violent one, found their justification. What we euphemistically called `the troubles' began.
By the time my youngest sister, Jane, Terry and Beatrice's, seventh child was born in the same hospital 11 years after me, Northern Ireland was in the grip of a bloody sectarian murder fest.

Sometime around then - possibly in the few years before Jane was born - I remember my dad asking us if we'd like to go to live in Australia.
He sat at the kitchen table filling in endless forms and collecting various data and documents, applying for our passage on the ten pound scheme.
I had no real idea what life in any part of Australia would be like. There was no Google then, no Neighbours, no Home and Away-  just Skippy The Bush Kangaro and Encyclopedia Britannica.
I imagined leaving shivering Derry far behind and wearing shorts all the time in a hot, slightly dusty countryside where I'd see kangaroos every day. Schooling would be via radio and doctors would rush to our aid in light aircraft. I was excited and appalled.

My parents never went through with their plan to escape the worsening Northern Ireland situation and it was to be about 40 years before I eventually got here. Somewhere during that time I learned that you had cities and hospitals and schools. It was a bit disappointing but I got over it.
While we never emigrated as a family at that time, there are now three of us living in Australia (perhaps the calling never went away) and my parents have been three times now on holiday.

I didn't leave Ireland as so many millions have done before me, out of economic necessity but out of a very modern selfish desire – the want of a fresh start, a longing for change.
While generations before me fled poverty and joblessness, mine is a more 21st century story.
An end to a long term relationship left me restless.
One of my sisters was already living in and loving Melbourne. She constantly urged me to pack up my life in – now in Belfast - and come to her.
Of course, she didn't, as generations before her would have done, send me my ticket money - money she'd been setting aside from her hard earned wages to bring family to the new country. She was too busy spending her money on the fabulous new Bayside life she had discovered!
Since, as I said, my emigration is a modern story, my ticket money came from the sale of my beloved Renault Megan coupe ( fabulous bronze colour, leather interior, enough air bags to render it airborne in a crash) and my living money came from the sale of the house I once shared with guy from the now defunct relationship.
What can I say – I’m a chic-lit character.

 I found the courage to apply for a visa and when, eight months later, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship emailed to say I could have one, I also found the courage to walk straight into my editor's office and hand in my resignation.

My physical leaving of Ireland was very 21st century, too. All the Irish ballads of my childhood and teenage years, told,(usually in about 15 morbid verses), of a young man sailing off into the sunset, while his beautiful colleen waved tearfully from the pier until the ship was long out of sight. In some of these tortuous songs, she never left the sea side, waiting, until death, for her love to come back to his beloved girl and his beloved Emerald Isle.
In my story, I, the woman, was doing the leaving and a not a heart broken lover but a gaggle of brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and parents were there to see me off.
They didn't wave romantically from the water's edge, but yelled their various goodbyes as I queued for post 9/11, detailed security checks in Belfast International Airport.
I cried the Niagara Falls and still crying shamelessly, I texted my goodbyes all over again from the departure lounge. 
I don't think there's a 15 verse tear jerking Celtic ballad in any of that.

I have been in Australia for three years now and love it. I am a journalist still, as I was in Ireland, but I have the change I yearned for anyway. Although the Belfast I left, with its peaceful prosperity was not the battle torn Belfast I arrived in as a university student in 1982, it was still the city I had been in for 26 years. I was feeling claustrophobic.
My coming to Melbourne has meant new friends, new work colleagues, sunshine, warmth, a more outdoors way of life and the freshness I had hoped for.
I am not homesick. I miss people I haven't seen since I left but I have no yearning to return. Again, there is no lengthy Irish ballad in that. Don't get me wrong. Ireland is a beautiful and diverse little country.
The mountains of Mourne, the glens of Antrim, the Burren, the music festivals of Galway, the great city of Dublin, the beauty of west county Cork and the rugged Atlantic coastline. I recommend it all. Go see it for yourselves.
I've done so many times and I’m eager now to see some of this huge country.

Last week, however, I joyfully celebrated my Irishness as I have done every March 17- St Patrick's Day - since I arrived in Melbourne.
For some ex pats it is traditionally a day to weep into your green beer, sing aforementioned sad ballads and long for home. For others its a time to simply enjoy being Irish while enjoying being in Australia.
Really, its as good an excuse for a party as any!
And, if ever there was a true representation of Ireland, it is St Patrick - or, at least, the story of St Patrick .  Part myth, part historical reconstruction, part adaptation, part truth and part utter fantasy - its as Irish a story as there is.
Grab your green Guinness and hold on tight to your leprechaun hat and your bunch of shamrock, because enlightenment is here.
Like learning that Santa- that wonderful magical man who could come down chimneys, leave great presents and had flying reindeer for mates – was, in fact, your boring parents, so the discovery of the real Patrick is painful.
I regret to inform you that he wasn’t even Irish but a Roman Briton, likely born in the 4th century near the Scottish border.
He was, however, kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold into slavery there. He would eventually escape to Gaul and return to Ireland to save us from ourselves and tell us how to live more moral lives – kind of like Bob Geldof and Bono.
And, as children we loved the tale of how Patrick stood on a rock with a staff , Moses style, and banished all the snakes from Ireland into the Irish Sea, where they thrash about to this day, trying to return home and making the sea rough with their attempts.
The truth is there were no snakes in Ireland.

He was not the first, but perhaps the third missionary to Ireland.
And alas, it seems, he wasn’t even called Patrick. That was the name he took on when he began his work for the church. Some sources claim his birth name was Maewyn Succat.

But we won’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story, certainly not in the way of a damn good party and never in the way of an excuse to parade. Those of you have been to Northern Ireland in the summer time, know we love a good march and a fancy parade.

The thing about celebrating Irishness away from Ireland, especially for those of us who came from the North where identity was a troubled, targeted, uneasy thing, is the simplicity of it.
We take the blarney, the myth, the awful Oirish paddy whackery and run with it. It’s a laugh.
Here, my expression of my Irishness is not a threat, perceived or otherwise, to anyone else.

I celebrated St Patrick's Day at a party at my sister's house. It was what any celebration of national identity should be - light hearted, fun and, above all, inclusive.
The Irish flag was just a representation of the country from which we came and not, as it has so often been in the north of Ireland, a tribal symbol, a sectarian symbol of aggression.
There were, in fact, just six Irish adults at the party, two Irish kids who see themselves as Aussie, two aussie/irish babies, a handful of English people, a French woman, an Italian, two Americans, a South African and a few Australians.
I suppose you could spend St Patrick's Day with your flag wrapped around you, gazing suspiciously at the rest of the world or you can enjoy it with friends regardless of colour, creed or place of birth.
My Irish day every year since 2008 has been in a microcosm of the Melbourne melting pot and I can't think of a better way of enjoying it.
We have all found a warm welcome here.
I am thankful I came and I am thankful for the generous, hospitable spirit I encountered.
There is, of course, a serious downside to the leaving of Ireland for Australia - the snakes! Another day, I'll tell you a story about a saint, banished Irish reptiles and their long journey down under on nothing but a bed of shamrock... its true . every word!

In the meantime, raise your glass to the wonderful St Patrick, his myth and reality and my home country, Ireland.
Slainte! That’s an Irish toast, meaning health. 
And, of course, there’s  a great yarn about that! At a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida, a few years ago, researchers reported that Guinness may be as effective as daily aspirin in reducing the blood clots that cause heart attacks ….
Believe it…. or not!