St Patrick’s Day down the local is one of the best nights out of the year, a non-stop party drenched in all things Irish. A celebration of Ireland’s freedom, which can never be entirely separated from history either.

For decades it was Ireland that defined first the British right, the Conservative and Unionist Party remember, and then latterly the street-fighting far right too with their links to loyalist paramilitaries and hatred of all things from Ireland.

Today such connections are broken, the last remnants the unofficial insertion of “No surrender” into the national anthem by a section of the football crowd at England internationals. No surrender? To what exactly?

But the framing of Britishness via its relationship to Ireland has to be accounted for by a range of factors beyond the narrowly political. St Patrick’s Day is emblematic of the complexity. Britishness is far more accommodating and porous than it is often credited for.

Beyond the body politic take music, literature, film and sport where a particular version of Irishness has been embraced. From punk icons Stiff Little Fingers to the Pogues, Sinead O’Connor via The Corrs to U2 this is a cultural insurgency that cannot be lightly discounted.

Roddy Doyle, particularly with his Barrytown trilogy of novels, transformed for a generation what Irish identity might look like. Full of humour yet never losing sight of where the Irish come from and what Ireland has been though to get there.

This summer, in the year of the 1916 Easter Rising centenary, Northern Ireland and the Republic will both compete — together and independently of one another — in a major football tournament for the first time.

At Euro 2016 there will be two “Green and White Armies.” Northern Ireland made it to World Cup ’82 in Spain, with Martin O’Neill a star of the team who now manages the Republic. They were there in Mexico four years later too for World Cup ’86. Then the Republic kind of took over, Euro ’88, Italia ’90 and World Cup ’94 — managed by Englishman Jack Charlton, one of the heroes of the England ’66 World Cup-winning team.

Big Jack built an Irish team by finding players in the English and Scottish leagues who qualified for Ireland via parentage but previously had never thought of playing for the Republic. But, notwithstanding the bending of who can and can’t “represent” Ireland, something more important was perhaps underway.

As the troubles in Northern Ireland edged their way towards an unfolding peace process on the pitch and in the stands what it meant to be Irish and what Ireland might become was being transformed.

But there remain those who would prefer to rewrite their own history. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were on Labour’s back benches when the IRA’s military campaign was in full and lethal swing. They were among the few who at the time argued that what was needed was a political solution and this must include both a dialogue with those behind the bombing and the ending of injustices dished out.

They were demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” then.

A Tory Party that seems to have forgotten John Major’s role in initiating the peace process is clearly gearing up to use those self-same smears now against a Labour leader and his shadow chancellor some 30 years later.

In Irish politics meanwhile we have seen the emergence of the civic nationalism of Sinn Fein, first mostly in the North but increasingly in the South too.

It goes without saying that Sinn Fein, like all those committed to a united Ireland, recognise no such border. An anti-austerity party that sits in the European Parliament with the European United Left alongside socialist and communist parties is a very different proposition to what might have been imagined was possible at the height of the Provos’ campaign in the 1980s.

And in the 2016 Irish general election, alongside the election of Sinn Fein TDs, anti-austerity TDs were also elected, while the Irish Labour Party continued its woeful decline, or Pasokification.

This year’s St Patrick’s Day for many will be the prelude to the Easter Rising centenary celebrations just a week and a bit later. The connections between the popular culture of a night out and a political legacy will never have been more obvious. 

Dublin today is a serious competitor to Barcelona and Prague as amongst budget airline travellers’ favourite European destinations for a city break.

Many will visit O’Connell Street to take a snap of the iconic Dublin General Post Office. But of course this isn’t simply a splendid example of late Georgian architecture nor merely a handy place to post a postcard home. It was the HQ in 1916 for the women and men who fought in the Easter Rising.

Ahead of the Rising across the front of Dublin’s Liberty Hall, home of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, a banner was hung: “We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland.” This was the nature of that break, the cause of self-determination and independence.

Yet, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, during the course of the Rising 570 Irish soldiers lost their lives on the Western Front following a particularly lethal German gas attack.

It was James Connolly’s vision that “the Irish people will not be free until they own everything from the plough to the stars.”

It is this vision that more than anything should frame how we celebrate Easter 1916. As a very Irish moment when the human potential of freedom and equality was most evident and could never be extinguished whatever the scale and might of the forces ranged against it. To that all of us, Irish or not, should gladly raise a glass on Thursday night. Happy St Patrick’s Day!

• Philosophy Football’s Easter 1916 T-shirt range, 20 per cent off until the end of St Patrick’s Day — quote coupon code Easter 2016 at checkout www.philosophyfootball.com or call (01273) 472-721 to order by phone.