I want to make a confession: I’ve never sampled green beer! You see, I grew up in Dublin, where in the 1980s, the St. Patrick’s Day parade, held in still-freezing March temperatures, was a fairly sombre, pallid march down central city streets. It was helped along by middle-aged Americans looking cheerful and wearing green or plaid trousers, looking like they had just stepped off a golf course, and marching bands from America, which were fun to watch and listen to. All I can remember besides that were floats from Irish insurance companies, the only companies that had any money in the 80s. And if we were lucky, the family got a post-parade meal of burgers and chips at an Americanized cafe called Solomon Grundy’s around the corner.

Anyway, when I came to America in my early 20s, it was a revelation to me that people got drunk and had…