We Need To Do Something About This View Of Irishness

2 of the books in this photo are so fucking dumb they have 4 leafed clovers on
the cover instead of shamrocks which of course have THREE leaves...

I took the kids to the New York City flagship Barnes and Noble on 82nd & Broadway yesterday where we encountered this St Patrick's Day display. This is how America's last major bookstore chain sees Irish culture. This is what they'd like Irish Americans to buy as a gift this St Patrick's Day. This is not the kids St Patrick's table with maybe an adult table upstairs or something. This is the only St Patrick's Day table in the store. Cheesy tat all of it. Now the funny thing is that when I first moved to America in 1993 I ended up working at this very Barnes and Noble on 82nd & Broadway. For two years in a row I was in charge of the St Patrick's Day display table and I had no shitty books on there. Instead I had Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bowen, Derek Mahon, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Robert McLiam-Wilson, Paul Muldoon, WB Yeats, JM Synge, James Joyce, Maeve Binchy, Edna O'Brien, Brian Friel, Roddy Doyle. And they all sold. If I was running it now I'd include Colm Toibin, Colum McCann, Charlotte and Emily Bronte (2nd gen Micks who spoke with an Ulster accent), Brian McGilloway, Steve Cavanagh, Eoin McNamee, Lucy Caldwell, Tana French, Stuart Neville, Alex Barclay, Jamie O'Neill, Colin Bateman, Arlene Hunt, Ian McDonald, Dec Burke, Dec Hughes, John Connolly or, goddammit, some Adrian McKinty. 
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You see the thing is: Ireland punches way above its weight in terms of literature. Always has and always will and today's Irish literary culture is just as vibrant as ever. The greatest flowering of poetry in the world in the last fifty years came out of the 1970s Belfast poetry circle, Ireland's playwrights are doing the funniest and most interesting stuff on the planet and of course the best crime writing on Earth isn't the overrated Nordic Noir writers but the Celtic Noir of Ireland and Scotland. 
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The display stand at Barnes and Noble is an utter embarrassment, but it's not really the fault of the bookstore. It's the fault of Irish America for allowing this version of Irishness to be tolerated. This is not what Irishness means to me and if its what Irishness means to you you're an eejit. We need to stop associating Irishness with drunken fools falling over in the street. The drunken sentimental Mick is not an affectionate or warm or accurate picture of what it means to be an Irishman or an Irish woman. Ireland is an intellectual country of saints and scholars, poets and professors. Ireland's literary and musical culture is one of the richest in the world and per capita we're only behind Iceland in terms of authors and musicians per head of population. Please don't buy any of these books as a St Patrick's day gift this year: they're about as Irish as a weak kneed German lager brewed in St Louis that has been dyed vomit green. Give your Irish friend some WB Yeats instead and they'll thank you for it.