Fire away: A Patriots’ Day holiday is a perfect fit for the rebel Irish

Nobody enjoys a day off work or values the past more than the Irish, so you’d think the Emerald Isle would be a bit more creative where its public holidays are concerned.

As it is, the vast majority of them are religious in nature or designated, quite simply and boringly, as “bank holidays” – which goes to demonstrate the massive influence financial and business institutions once exerted over the country, in tandem with Catholic Church authorities and the political class.

At least in the U.S., long weekends get dressed up. There’s Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day and Indigenous People’s Day, the recently reconstituted Columbus Day.

You get the picture. Some historical resonance goes a long way in justifying a sleep-in or a trip to the beach.

In Massachusetts, we celebrate Patriots’ Day, a civic holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. (Maine also accords Patriots’ Day official holiday status, perhaps because the Pine Tree State was part of a greater Massachusetts until the Missouri Compromise of 1820 resulted in statehood for our northern neighbors.)

As I see it, a similar holiday would seem a perfect fit for Ireland, given the country’s illustrious rebel past.

A few short years ago, Ireland engaged in the centennial commemoration of perhaps the biggest historical event ever to occur on this island: the 1916 Easter Rising. I don’t care where your forebears hail from – Europe, South America, the Caribbean, or the Far East – no country anywhere in the world has a more significant day on its national calendar.

Yet you wouldn’t know it from the way the event is generally remembered. From what I’ve seen in my 30-plus years here, official Ireland marks the day with appropriate pomp and circumstance – the president, accompanied by military honor guards, lays a wreath outside the General Post Office in Dublin, a pivotal 1916 battle site – but the wider society has only a passing interest at best.

By comparison, St. Patrick’s Day – which celebrates some vague notion of Irishness – is monumental in scope with its silly parades and pageantry, both in Ireland and around the world.

There are two possible reasons for the Irish public’s indifference toward an act of rebellion rivaling Boston’s own “shot heard ‘round the world.” First, Easter falls on a different Sunday from year to year, depending on the phases of the moon. (You can look it up.) For a holiday to gain traction in the public imagination, a fixed date is essential – even if the elements for a compelling celebration of the 1916 Rising are ever present: heroic patriots, an honorable cause, and a dramatic (and complicated) denouement.

Also, it is worth remembering that the 1916 Rising was not popularly supported at the time – or even in the decades to follow. Indeed, the situation might have stayed that way if the British government hadn’t responded with such blinkered and savage incompetence, executing the insurrection’s main players and arresting thousands of others.

And that divided opinion continues to a small degree today. In most people’s estimation, the courageous words and deeds of the activists, educators and general rabble-rousers inside Dublin’s GPO in 1916 gifted future generations the present-day Irish republic.

But for a scattering of others, the rebellious folly undertaken by Pearse, Connolly, Clarke and their compatriots served to inflict further misery upon the Irish capital and its already distressed tenement-dwellers – and perhaps even delayed Irish independence.

Finally, this being Ireland, the picture wouldn’t be complete without the dissidents, those folks, on both sides of the border, who believe the job begun by the 1916 rebels is unfinished business so long as six Ulster counties remain in the United Kingdom. (Irish historical memory, as I’ve come to discover, is nearly a living organism, with a century nearly a blink of the eye.)

So even as the Easter rebellion grows more distant in memory, its significance will continue to be duly noted each year by historians, politicians, and interested laymen. But Irish authorities have undoubtedly dropped the ball over the years by not positioning the 1916 Rising beside (or indeed in lieu of) St. Patrick’s Day as an annual holiday of international stature, comparable to the Fourth of July or Bastille Day.

Ireland deserves a Patriots’ Day to call its own. Let’s hope that in another hundred years, commentators won't be still asking for that level of recognition.

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest publication is the column collection “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations.”