Green paint and double standards: What St Patrick’s Day reveals about us

Last Tuesday, thousands of Maltese people painted their faces green, flooded the streets of St Julian's and celebrated with enormous, unapologetic joy the patron saint of Ireland.

Good. Life is short. Celebrate.

But hold that image in your mind for a moment.

Hold the green face paint, the plastic shamrocks, the Guinness, the noise, the crowds, the sheer exuberant rightness of it all - the complete absence of anyone asking whether this is appropriate, whether it is too loud, whether these people belong here, whether they should perhaps take their celebration somewhere more private.

Hold it.

Because I need to tell you about other groups of people who wanted to celebrate outdoors in Malta.

They did not travel to do so. They are already here. They deliver your food round the clock, clean your homes, care for your elderly parents, staff the hospital wards that kept some of you alive during the pandemic.

They are Indian, Filipino and Nepalese. And when they organised a celebration of their own culture in a public space, they were met not with the easy warmth extended to a street party for a fifth-century Irish bishop, but with offence.

Let that sit with you.

There is an unspoken agreement that Maltese society has made with the migrant workers who keep much of its daily life functioning. It is never written down, never stated aloud, because stating it aloud would require us to confront what it actually says. 

It goes, roughly, like this: you may be here, but you should remain invisible outside of your role.

You may have a private life, but your culture should not occupy our public space. We will tolerate your presence, but we would prefer not to witness your full humanity.

When Indian, Filipino and Nepalese workers organise a public celebration, they are doing something entirely reasonable, entirely lawful, and apparently intolerable: they are declining to be invisible on cue.

They are saying, we also have a culture. We also have dignity. We also exist beyond our function in your hospital, hotel, or household. And for people who have - consciously or not - defined these workers as background figures, that assertion can feel, irrationally but revealingly, like a provocation.

A provocation of what, exactly?

The St Patrick’s Day street party does not threaten anyone’s sense of who the Maltese are. On the contrary, embracing it feels cosmopolitan, European, and modern. 

It is a foreign culture adopted on our own terms, at our own pleasure, with no obligation to the actual people who carry it.

We can enjoy it without knowing anything about the Irish famine, without knowing that Ireland was itself a colonised island whose people were once told their culture was inferior, without any relationship of accountability to the Irish people at all.

Indian, Filipino and Nepalese cultures do not arrive pre-packaged for our consumption. They arrive attached to people who are already here, already known to us, already assigned a social role. They do not flatter our self-image. They do not make us feel international.

They simply ask to exist, and that, it turns out, is a far greater demand than any street party.

Some cultures are permitted to be publicly celebrated, associated with modernity and openness. Others are expected to remain quiet, private, contained, and unobtrusive

This is what in sociology is described as a prestige hierarchy of cultures.

Some cultures are permitted to be publicly celebrated, associated with modernity and openness. Others are expected to remain quiet, private, contained, and unobtrusive.

What determines which is which is not the culture itself, but the status of the people who carry it, and where they are positioned within the social hierarchy.

Here is something worth remembering on a Tuesday afternoon in a sea of green: Malta was colonised.

For centuries, foreign powers decided that Maltese culture, the Maltese language, and Maltese customs were inferior, provincial, not quite civilised enough for the public square. The wounds of that history are not ancient; our great-grandparents lived within its long shadow.

And now? A section of Maltese society is reproducing, with remarkable precision, the same posture toward people further down the hierarchy. 

The message has not changed. Only the messengers have.

This is not a comfortable observation. It is not meant to be.

I am not expecting anyone to stop celebrating the Apostle of Ireland. Far from it. Celebrate it loudly. Celebrate it every year. It’s good for business.

I am asking for something much simpler: consistency. 

If it is acceptable to fill the streets in the name of a patron saint of a country not our own, then it is acceptable for Indian, Filipino and Nepalese caregivers, nurses and cleaners to dance in a Maltese square on their feast day. 

If it is not acceptable for them to do so, then let’s be honest about what principle is actually being applied here, because it is not a principle about noise, or public order, or cultural appropriateness.

It is a principle about who counts. About whose joy is permitted to take up space. About which humans are allowed to be fully human in public.

I will leave you with this.

Last Tuesday, many Maltese poured into the streets in green hats to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, and all was loud and joyful and entirely unquestioned.

And somewhere nearby, a  Nepalese woman, who has spent the last three years wiping the chins and changing the nappy of someone else’s elderly parent, will remember that when her community tried to do something similar - celebrate, take up space, exist publicly - people were offended.

She will probably say nothing. She has learned the terms of the contract.

The question is whether we are comfortable with that.

Whether in a country that has known what it is to be told your culture does not deserve the public square, we are truly comfortable with that.

I do not think we should be.