Happy St Patrick's Day (per tutti quelli che hanno trovato o lasciato in Irlanda un pezzo di se stessi)

“Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course the gaunt Hag of Beare. Originally a land of woods and thickets, such as Orpheus had seen when prescribing the voyage of Jason, through a misted atmosphere. She is thought to have known invasion from the time when the Ice Age ended and the improving climate allowed deer to throng her dense forests.
These infiltrations have been told and fabricated by men and by mediums who described the violation of her body and soul. Ireland has always been Godridden. St Patrick, her patron saint (uncanonized!) fled as a slave from Antrim in answer to a voice that told him to join a ship and go to the Continent. He travelled with a consignment of Irish wolfhounds and got off in France, where at Auxerre, he studied to be a cleric. Again a voice accompanied by a vision summoned him back to Ireland and in the fifth century he began to convert the North, then the lowlands, so that the speech and thinking of men changed as they fell under Patrick’s rule and the yoke of the Scriptures. Patrick’s forebears, the Romans, did not invade Ireland, but Tacitus records how a Roman general gazed across the sea from Scotland and reckoned that a single legion could have subdued her. He was possibly mistaken, for despite the many other legions that tried to subdue her, Ireland was never fully taken, though most thoroughly dispossessed.”

(Edna O’Brien, “Mother Ireland”, Penguin 1976)