The Wearing of the Green

True confessions, right off the bat: Once upon a time, I was a St. Patrick’s Day snob.

Having been raised on the stories of the way it used to be when our family farmed rocky acres in Sligo, weaned on the music of the emerald shore, all harps and pipes and mournful tenors who couldn’t ever get what they most wanted, I had certain ideas about the proper way to spend March 17.

I heard all about how it used to be a somber occasion to celebrate Irish nationality, before it became a global excuse to tie one on.

Once I had a place of my own and enough money to throw a serious party, I spent long hours trying to create the perfect menu, set-list and lineup of booze, so I could spread the gospel of The Way It Was Supposed to Be, scorning the sea of green beer and corned beef and cabbage as I rolled out that year’s soda bread and cooked up that year’s Guinness beef stew.

And then old age did me a favor and smacked me in the gob.

I realized how beautiful it was that the holiday – like Halloween, another Celtic original – had become way bigger than any notion about What It Ought to Be.

It’s Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve and everybody’s birthday rolled into one. And it arrives in the middle of March, when everyone is primed for something to celebrate.

Which of course brings me to Limerick Junction, Atlanta’s oldest continuously operating Irish pub. I knew it would be swamped on St. Patrick’s Day, beyond standing room only, and wondered what it would be like to be in the calm before the storm. So I stopped by early on the Thursday before.

Fortune smiled upon me: Not only was the bar quiet enough to chat up the bartender – though it had its share of people who gravitate to Irish bars because they know wherever they find one, anywhere in the world, they’ll be made to feel at home – but he turned out to be Liam Murphy from Cork City, Ireland.

Manager and part-owner, he was glad to talk about the day he that’s a national holiday at home and his most lucrative of the year in America.

Last year, he said, a crowd lined the sidewalk in front of the North Highland bar just waiting for him to open the door and start pouring. They’re there every year, rain or shine.

Murphy shakes his head as he remembers the scene last St. Patrick’s Day. “We had a queue at 11:30,” he said with a laugh. “Last year it was rain and they were lined up anyway.”

Traditionally, bar attendance starts to climb the Saturday before St. Patrick’s, he said, when folks who’ve attended the parade downtown crowd in afterward. It stays busier than usual until the day itself, when the city’s oldest continuously operating Irish bar morphs into Party Central and celebrate the day with a proper Guinness or Irish whiskey – pints upon pints of green beer.

Last year, some 1,500 souls streamed through the doors, jostling between the bar and parking lot out back until 2:30 the next morning, when doors finally closed and the stream of cabs out front ferried the faithful home.

“We make in a day what we usually make in a week,” Murphy said in a voice steeped in the music of his native Cork City. He’s got thoughts about how the day has evolved over time, but no complaints.

“We do it because people want it,” he said about adding that drop of green food coloring to the pints on St. Pat’s.

Apparently, a little food coloring goes a long way. Do people actually ask for it, or is that just what Limerick serves on March 17?

“They see someone else order one,” Murphy said, “and then off it goes.”

The native of Cork has been tending bar on St. Patrick’s for the past 15 years, half in Ireland and half in the states. By the late ‘80s, he said, the bars back home had started pouring on March 17 to cater to the American tourists whose notions of what the day meant had gotten wilder by the decade.

His first taste of tending an American bar on St. Pat’s was in the late ‘90s, in South Florida.

“It’s a good Irish story actually,” Murphy said of his time at the Blarney Pub in Palm Beach Gardens. “I wound up there because my uncle was the parish priest.”

I asked him if he got a kick out of being behind the bar on St. Patrick’s Day in America on the day when everyone supposedly wants to be Irish.

“Originally it was kind of strange,” he said of getting used to green beer and corned beef and cabbage while knowing that back home, people would be eating cured ham with their cabbage, or some Irish beef stew.

But he’s gotten used to it.

So, I asked him if he won the lottery and could go anywhere he wanted on March 17, where would he choose? Back home for a quiet celebration in Ireland, or on the other side of the bar in America?

“I’d be in Montserrat in the Caribbean,” Murphy said. “It’s the only country in the world other than Ireland where it’s a public holiday.”

Limerick Junction, 822 N. Highland Ave., 404-874-7147. Doors open for St. Patrick’s Day at 11:30 a.m. Thursday and close at 2:30 a.m. Friday.