A St. Patrick’s Day Reflection
The intersection of Catalonia and Spain
Preamble:
A little beer now and then is good for the spirits. Getting drunk on St. Patrick’s Day is not the spirit I celebrate St. Paddy’s day. My Irish grandparents drowned in their alcoholism, and destroyed their families because of it. On this St. Paddy’s Day, I am sober and healthy. So many marvelous things to celebrate about Ireland and Irish culture. Their commitment to peace is one that I am very proud of. I have a longer post. With “Girl of Galway Bay,” A story I will present at the European Storytellers Festival in June, and hopefully (home) in Ireland in July.
Happy Birthday Dad: My Dad, Arnold, who was Jewish, and would have been 95 today. Though we did not always see eye to eye on things. I knew he loved me unconditionally and was proud. About a year before he died he sent me a poem. Dad, who was very smart, with an 8th grade education, never wrote a poem except this. “Naches” The pride, one has, in their children. Dad”
Girona Spain and Ireland
Today is Saint Patrick’s Day. I am in Girona. Catalonia. A region that spent decades being told its language did not exist — that the words in people’s mouths were not words at all. Only noise. Only stubbornness. Only the past refusing to die. As a child I lived in Spain in the 1950’s and that memory of Spain has endured over these past sixty years.
I don’t celebrate St. Paddyy’s day and all the wearing of the green, green beer, Leprechauns, and all ephemera. I celebrate Ireland as a nation of survival, which survived the occupation of the Vikings, and the five hundred years of English occupation and looting of our country.
Our forests were stolen — our oak, our ash, and hauled to English shipyards that brought more of the misery of English colonialism to the world. Our forests were burned from charcoal. Our people were impoverished, often times serfs in our own country, and when we couldn’t afford to stay some fled to English to work in the satanic mills of the Industrial Revulsion.
The Irish Famine of 1845-1852 was not a famine but an inadvertent genoicide that left a million dead and two million of our people were forced into exile to the far corners of the world. Our language was suppressed, and our culture and heritage almost disappeared.
I am here — in Catalonia — where Franco beat children for speaking Catalan in school. Where poets were censored, exiled, shot. Where a culture was told it had no right to exist. With the advent of the “Spanish Civil War” and the death of tens of thousands, and the suppression of Catalan culture and language, the impact is still being felt today
I am here in Girona to see if I can find a production company for my play, Lorca and Neruda: Love Letters. Federico García Lorca the great poet and dramatists murdered by Franco’s fascists in 1936, thrown into an unmarked grave, his name forbidden. Pablo Neruda — exiled, and then poisoned by Pinochet’s agents twelve days after the coup of 1973. The fascist soldiers of Italy, Germany, and Franco’s forces not only killed the poets and innocents, it laid the ground work for WWII where over 45 million people were killed.
The Irish Republicans who crossed into Spain to fight Franco in the Lincoln Brigade knew what they were fighting. They had lived under occupation. They recognized fascism’s face because they had already seen it up close. They chose solidarity. They chose the right side. They crossed a border to defend another people’s right to exist.
In Chile in 1973, in the National Stadium, they brought Victor Jara — poet, singer, voice of a people. They broke his hands so he could not play his guitar. He sang anyway. His last song was Venceremos. We will prevail.
That same moral clarity lives in Ireland today — one of the few nations with the courage to stand against the ongoing war on the Islamic world. To name what powerful countries will not name. To refuse comfortable silence when silence is complicity.
Globally, we are witnessing the rise of fascism, and militarism. The lessons learned from the struggle for freedom in Ireland and Catalonia is inspirational. People can resist and overcome
The words that echo here in Catalonia is Catalunya per Sempre. Catalonia Forever.
In Ireland, we say, Erin Go Bragh
— Namaya, Girona, Catalonia | March 17, 2026
Avui és el dia de Sant Patrici. Sóc a Girona. Catalunya. Una regió que va passar dècades escoltant que la seva llengua no existia, que les paraules a la boca de la gent no eren paraules en absolut. Només soroll. Només tossuderia. Només el passat que es nega a morir.
Yes, slowly, slowly, miki miki learning Catalan