Kiss me, I'm Irish--and staying home.

Cyril Connelly observed that no nation, however remote or uncouth, had failed to isolate alcohol from the multitudinous and disparate vegetations of the earth. The Irish have been no exception. Their contribution is whiskey itself, a word derived from the Gaelic "uisce beatha," which means "water of life." To be sure, there is a distilled alcoholic beverage known as "scotch," but true Irishmen consider it merely an imitation of the real thing.

I didn't think much about drinking when I was young. My Irish ancestors were my mother's people, Catholic Ulstermen who had the sense to leave the Protestants behind, and while they may have had vices, none drank to excess. Once on my own at college, though, I found bars surrounding my alma mater as the Mexicans had the Alamo. The amateurs went to the Pinewood and the professionals, or, if you prefer, heady residue patronized the Terminal Bar, which literally stood at the end of the line, in the shadows of the 242nd St. stop on the 1 train. I found numerous opportunities to contemplate human nature with one foot on the brass rail and an elbow on the mahogany.

Drink may, indeed, lie at the core of our identity. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the Irish believe far too much in spirits to believe in spiritualism. On the other hand, as a classmate suggested, Ireland and Irish whiskey?perhaps we should just call it "Irish"?may just raise a nagging question of grammatical propriety. While meditating over a particularly fine single malt from some obscure distillery in County Meath, he asked those lining the bar, "Which is correct: In Dublin the best Irish is drunk? Or, In Dublin, the best Irish are drunk?" None replied.

The stereotype of the drunken Irishman has some basis. According to statistics from the Journal of Alcoholism and Merck, the per capita annual consumption of alcohol in Ireland was 5.8 liters in 1966 and 11.6 liters in 1999. By contrast, France, where alcohol as wine is as much a part of the national diet as bread or meat, fell from 20.8 liters to 10.7 liters. Obviously, something is driving the Irish to drink; not that we need be driven very far or very fast.

I was educated in parochial schools (Sisters of Mercy) and graduated from Manhattan College (Christian Brothers) and Fordham University (Jesuits). Despite constant exposure to Irish Catholicism in my formative years, I have never marched in a St. Patrick's Day parade. Too many amateur drinkers roam the streets, and I might resent being soaked in vomit. I expected such foolishness back in college days, when many of my classmates were Irish by heritage and a few by birth, and the only alcohol problem most of them had was that they couldn't get enough of it. Like Rabelais, they drank for the thirst to come, and it was one of them who told me that an Irish queer was a man who preferred women to drink.

To be sure, Brendan Behan (for whom "New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment?a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat"), who preferred men to women before his passion for booze overcame all others, often said the ideal breakfast was a large brandy and a plateful of Benzedrine. He created in The Quare Fella an old lag with lumbago who, arguing for the medicinal virtues of even the more extreme spirits, joyously quaffs a bottle of methyl alcohol meant purely as a lubricant for muscular massage and then, after what would be for most of us a death-dealing dose, observes, "There's a cure in that against the cold and want of the world?"

Behan came from a family of writers. That is to say, the Behans specialized in lettering signs, which in the Irish painting trades was called "writing." A friend of Behan's once recalled meeting an old crony of Behan's father in the Painters' and Decorators' Union. In their conversation, Ryan referred to Behan as "Brendan, you know, the writer."

"The writer?" he replied. "There's only one writer in that family, and that's the father, Stephen. Did you ever see the sign for Guinness he done up there on the gable over Slattery's in Phibsboro? Them letters is seven-foot high. And the pint he drew beside it, with the shine down the side and the big foamy head? Now that's writing. No? Stephen was the only one ever wrote in that family."

So, no parade for me. I won't even begin thinking about how American marketing tackily transformed Irish folk legend and the Celtic twilight into a niagara of green beer, cardboard leprechauns and buttons reading "Kiss Me, I'm Irish." Better to stay home.