April Fool’s Day apart, there is one day that gets more annoying each year – St Patrick’s Day. Even the Irish complain of being coerced into binge-drinking by all the hype. Green hat day is styled as some kind of boozy United Nations party.

This year it was on a Friday, with advertisers wishing everyone a “Happy St Patrick’s Weekend”.

The first sparkly green hat appeared at about noon. It was a sign that St Julian’s was about to fall to the “Oirish”. (The person sporting the hat looked about as Irish as a sheikh.)

The beer-fuelled street bash would later vomit a wall-to-wall carpet of plastic cups and aluminium cans all over Spinola before the night of March 17 was ended. It was just the beginning of the shenanigans.

The man in the sparkly hat walked with a confident, bouncing stride in the direction of Spinola Bay. You could bet your leprechaun’s left ear that he was headed for one of the Irish-styled pubs in the area...and he was weaving.

This was not out of premature drunkenness. It was because he had to navigate past no less than three construction cranes within a 100-metre stretch of pavement. Subsequent pedestrians would be treated to the reek of urine before this night of plastic Paddy ‘culture’ was over.

As the day progressed, drinking got under way. By 8pm, crowds were milling about at Spinola Square. They brought traffic to a halt in the way that all good traditions do in Malta, with the exception that this isn’t one of them. Yet traffic was backed up to Pietà as the street capitulated to a morass of bodies.

The event was hailed as a “success”... but a success for whom? For promoters who want to sell more beer but baulk at cleaning up the results so that we get to pay for it?

Revellers with clearly no genetic link to the Celtic race certainly looked even sillier than the rest

Revellers with clearly no genetic link to the Celtic race certainly looked even sillier than the rest. A paucity of ancestral links to the ancient celebration lent a vague aimlessness to the greater part of the evening.

Now I’m not saying you must have flame red hair and smiling emerald eyes to wear a silly hat on St Patrick’s Day. It’s just that you’ll look a whole lot sillier if you’re an indigenous native of Alaska or Somalia in a shamrock hat.

Had there been a focal point for the Spinola event – an Irish ballad or a jig – there may have been some soul to it.

Loudspeakers kept pounding out the same audio-porridge as heard endlessly at local sporting events, sales promotions and other crowd-pulling manifestations. A green T-shirt worn by a British tourist quaffing pints had it neatly nailed with the wording: “Who the **** is Patrick?”

Above all, it was a pee-fest. What goes in must come out. As bladders swelled there was a sudden inability of the available facilities to cope with the surge.

Queues for the toilets at long-suffering outlets like Costa and McDonald’s were impossibly long and butt-wriggling. Out in the street, nature’s beer-besieged call was answered by quite a number who simply relieved themselves against the nearest wall. They were beyond caring how visible or on-your-doorstep their behaviour was to the rest of us.

Outside a pub in Balluta Bay, a roast suckling pig stand, an open-air bar and a solitary porta-loo spilled into public space. The crowds attracted by these chronologically necessary facilities took up the entire pavement area. An elderly couple was observed gingerly stepping off the curb onto a busy main road to work their way past these obstacles.

On a technical point, despite the green hats and face paint, St Patrick probably wore blue. A type of indigo from the woad plant was the original national colour. Green became the dominant hue for St Patrick’s Day to highlight Irish nationalism against British rule in the 1790s.

And Nigeria is the largest consumer of Guinness.

Thankfully, nothing at St Julian’s has ever come close to the 2012 riot in Canada. It was sparked off by a St Patrick’s Day drinking binge in London, Ontario – a city tarnished by police brutality.

After a day of drinking the Ontario green hats started setting things on fire: trees, fences... and a television news van. Then they attacked the police and firemen who were called to the scene. Some even boasted about their exploits on social media and were caught.

Eight students were arrested and suspended from their college amid disgust and extreme disapproval from the community.

Aimee Morrison, English professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, noted that social media can carry more personal consequence to revellers than the law: “You really don’t want that photo of you throwing up in someone’s rose bushes haunting Google searches of you forever.”

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