St Patrick’s Day came and went last weekend and there was the usual sense of Déjà vu about proceedings.

Politicians and parents fretted about the kids running wild on drink and drugs, there was a mini riot in Finglas in Dublin where several cars were burnt out and 17 arrests were made. Meanwhile there were complaints that the big parades were “too multi-cultural” and not Irish enough while the locals in small towns and villages up and down the country were awestruck by the displays of agriculture machinery and local GAA teams parading down the main streets.

Of course, as far as RTÉ was concerned, Dublin was the place to be, missing the point that the small-scale cobbled together local parade is the true heart of St Patrick’s Day.

For the motorist however this can be very bad news. Motormouth will never learn when it comes to St Patrick’s Day, despite being caught out many times before I yet again ended up driving across the country on St Patrick’s Day.

Returning to Cork from a wedding in the North East, Motormouth had been on the road just a few minutes before hitting the first St Patrick’s Day obstacle in the sleepy West Meath town of Clonmellon.

Clonmellon sits on the main N52 route, not far from Kells, Co Meath. The N52 is one of those wonderful Irish roads that wriggles its way across the country (in this case from Dundalk to Nenagh) handling ridiculously large amounts of traffic for the majority of its two lane, can’t overtake length resulting in hours of fun.

The road passes straight thorough Clonmellon, a town which is most notable for the lack of people to be seen when you pass through it. Not on St Patrick’s Day though. The streets were thronged with locals enjoying the paddy-whackery being belted out by four rotund, middle-aged gents on the back of a truck.

Without realising it, we were in fact part of the parade as the traffic rumbled down the main street, between the stage and the crowd to much applause. One of the musicians on stage helpfully pointed out, “Clonmellon is on the main N52 to the south of the country, so there’s not much we can do about the traffic” before he launched into a rousing rendition of ‘Muirsheen Durkin’.

We headed on south from Clonmellon hopeful that it would be the last delay on our already lengthy journey. Our hopes were dashed when we reached Mountmellick in County Laois. Mountmellick is one of those places you wouldn’t really notice you had driven through, simply because it has no distinctive features. It’s a sleepy, non-descript country town and not very attractive at that, the worst kind of place to be stuck for an hour in a St Patrick’s Day jam.

As we approached the town we noticed lots of people all walking in the direction of the town centre. There were groups of kids, families pushing buggies and elderly couples. From the evidence it was fair to deduce that the denizens of Mountmellick were all heading to the main street to celebrate the national day by watching agricultural machinery driver down it, very slowly.

This time though we thought we’d be clever, and skip around Mountmellick before we could be unwittingly snared into the parade, Clonmellon style. We took a promising looking turn which pointed in the kind of direction we wanted to go. After a few more twists and turns we found ourselves in exactly the same place we would have been if we had just followed the road, although a little earlier, at the start of the parade route on the main street.

Mountmellick had beaten us; we were doomed to spend St Patrick’s Day in traffic jams in non-descript, midlands towns. Well, not if Mrs Motormouth had her way, she reversed Starsky and Hutch style, squeaked down a narrow road and somehow, miraculously engineered our escape. We eventually emerged on the other side of the town and headed on our way.

Following a narrow escape in Portlaoise we finally made it to the main Dublin to Cork road. Despite the heavy traffic we felt sure that on this major route at least they couldn’t possibly allow a parade to cause traffic mayhem, could they?

At the village green in Johnstown, a big garda stood in the middle of the road advising each car as it approached that the parade in Urlingford had “been delayed”. He proceeded to give us complicated directions on how to travel the boreens of Kilkenny and Tipperary to avoid Urlingford and eventually continue on to Cork.

His incomprehensible accent and assumption that we had even a notion of where such and such cross was located didn’t help. It was a pleasant enough, if bumpy excursion in the spring sunshine and we did, incredibly end up back on the main road somewhere south of Urlingford.

It was our last encounter on the drive home which passed for the rest of its duration without incident. Needless to say, we wont be driving across the country on St Patrick’s Day again, well until next year anyway.

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