ALL OVER the world on March 17 Irish exiles, descendants of Irish emigrants of long ago, and Hibernophiles celebrate Ireland's most famous saint, St. Patrick. The wearing of the green on that day has become almost an obligatory part of claiming and displaying Irish ancestry. It is also probably fair to say that until recently the day was more important outside of Ireland for the celebrating or proclaiming of Irishness—but even now in Ireland the festival spirit is catching on. While it was always a holy day in Ireland, it is now becoming a day of celebrating Irish identity.
Most people around the world who celebrate the day probably have no idea of who Patrick was or how he came to be the patron saint of Ireland and the curator of all things Irish. The stories and myths surrounding Patrick are so numerous that it is hard to peel back the layers added over many centuries and find the real man. For example, the shamrock, so much a part of the modern St. Patrick's Day, became associated with Patrick only in the seventeenth century as a way of teaching the people of that time about Christianity. The story of the snakes was probably invented in medieval times. Patrick's travels within Ireland are so exaggerated that he would have had to have lived for hundreds of years to have been to the places he is reputed to have visited and founded all the churches he is said to have established. Charlie Doherty, a historian with the National University of Ireland in Dublin, says, "That's the thing about myth, it constantly changes itself and remakes itself, depending on circumstance . . . and what we see nowadays is the cult of Patrick and the contemporary view of it." The cult of Patrick: modern scholars return to this expression again and again. Over the centuries that cult has been added to so many times that it is sometimes hard to separate the myth from reality.
How did this one man become so important to Ireland? Did he really single-handedly convert the pagan Irish to Christianity? The story of Patrick and the Irish is something we can look at from a number of sources, including Patrick's own description of his life. The saga begins on the island of Britain.
On the other side of the Irish Sea, by the middle of the fifth century Roman Britain was in decline. Having conquered the island of Britain in A.D. 43, the Roman legions were now leaving the British shores and returning home. Ireland, alone in Europe, lay outside the Roman Empire but was wealthy enough to have traded with it. Roman trading posts have been excavated at the Drumanagh peninsula just north of Dublin. The site sits on the coast across from Lambay Island, which was probably used as a stopping-off port. Barry Raftery, the archaeologist who excavated the site, claims that the Irish traded with the Roman Empire while remaining outside of it. Drumanagh was an important and large trading post, and he explains, "Aerial photographs suggest circular houses and this seems to indicate that this was a place where native Irish were living, trading with the Roman world. They were trading here with Romans and all sorts of other people coming from the Roman Empire." The Irish were very familiar with the Roman world lying just across the sea from them.
They had also figured out that there was valuable bounty to be had by plundering along the British coast and carrying off young men and women to Ireland and selling them into slavery. This was a practice that had been going on for many years, and the Irish had become quite adept at grab-and-run raids. As the Roman armies receded, the British shores were even less protected than before, and Irish raiding increased. The Irish even settled in parts of Britain for trading purposes, and one settlement, that of the Irish Dál Riada in Scotland, grew to become a major one as the Irish established a permanent colony there. The word "Scot" is taken from the Latin word "Scoti" meaning the Irish. In fact the word "Scotland" means the land of the Irish. These Irish settlers gave Scotland its name and the Gaelic language that was brought over with the Irish settlers at this time.
One raid that was to secure a lasting place in Irish history was the taking of a young boy from his British home for slavery in Ireland. The sixteen-year-old boy was called Patrick. He was captured and taken across the Irish Sea and sold into slavery in Ireland. Although British in origin, Patrick was destined to become the patron saint of the Irish; his name would forevermore be associated with the country. Yet the symbol of Patrick, the single-handed converter of the Irish to Christianity, is as much an invention as anything else. Great stories, miracles, and legends have been fabricated and woven around his life. Yes, he did exist, and two documents that have survived from him tell us much about his early life, but it was actually some time after his death that he became the legend we know today.
There are more legends about Patrick than actual fact. The two texts Patrick wrote that survived give us an interesting insight into his life and experiences. One document is his own autobiography, usually called the Confession, and the other is a letter written later in his life. His Confession gives us a lot of information on his early life and his relationship with Ireland and the Irish. One of the reasons why the cult of Patrick survived and grew is because of this extraordinary account of his life written in the fifth century A.D. It is a fascinating way of learning about the adventures of a teenage boy at that time.
In his own words Patrick tells us that soon after he was captured by Irish sailors he was sold into slavery and brought to the west of Ireland. He worked on a sheep farm near the Wood of Fochloch overlooking Killala Bay—part of modern-day County Mayo. The area today looks very much the same as it did in the time of Patrick: rural and isolated, with sheep scattered on the hillsides. Patrick was a Christian boy and had been raised in a Christian country, so Ireland was a very different and strange place to him. Christianity had come to Britain through the spread of this new religion via the Boman Empire. In his Confession Patrick also tells of his early life in Britain where he was born around the year 400. He was the son of a deacon and the grandson of a Christian priest. This was long before clerical celibacy became a general rule for the Boman priesthood. The only religion that Patrick would have known in his childhood was Christianity. His world would have been a totally Christian one. In spite of previous attempts to bring Christianity to Ireland, the Irish were still largely a pagan people living with their druidic beliefs and practices. They would still have been celebrating their important feast days with great gatherings at the ancient ritual sites. Likewise the social structure of Ireland would have been very different from the rest of Europe in that there were no towns or urban centers.
Patrick felt a complete stranger to all of this. He was young and frightened. He explains that when he was taken captive, "I was an adolescent, almost a speechless boy before I knew what to seek or what to avoid." He had to grow up fast and survive emotionally. He also tells us in sad, humble tones that he deserved this fate of being taken from his home because in Britain he had strayed from God and did not keep the commandments. He is not specific in details but he mentions a sin which troubled him all his life. We have no way of knowing what he is referring to but perhaps his missionary work was a way of gaining salvation and absolution from this sin.
As a boy slave in Ireland, Patrick had to work hard tending flocks of sheep on the isolated hill in Fochloch Wood. It was here, in this isolated place that the youth started to pray. He was lonely and he missed his home and everything that was familiar to him. The urban youth must have felt he was truly cast out from all he had known. So he prayed many times during the day and then started to pray into the night. Gradually the young Patrick tells us that he felt the spirit of his Christian God enter into him. We can imagine the lonely youth far from home, living among strangers, turning to the God of his childhood to try to gain comfort. Praying probably also brought him closer to the world of his family. Familiar and remembered words of prayer probably invoked strong memories for him. The rebellious teenager now wanted and needed the security of his parents' world and the God he had been brought up to believe in. Ireland's religious practices were too alien to him, so Patrick could not turn to the druids to guide him spiritually. Their religion was virtually unknown to him, and their rituals must have seemed strange and foreign. Patrick was very much alone in praying to his Christian God. On the principal feast days of the Celts the solitary youth would have ignored the celebrations and was probably even a little horrified at the spectacle of feasting and excess, as he would have thought it. In one Irish text written after the saint's death, Patrick expresses horror at the amount of feasting and merriment at religious festivals and is depicted as chiding the Celtic hero Oisín for being too fond of having a good time. Every aspect of life in Ireland, with no towns and no Roman influence, was very different from what he had left behind in Christian Britain.
In his Confession Patrick describes how comfort came one dark, chilly night in the form of a voice which said to him, "It is good that you pray and fast and soon you will go back to your homeland." Patrick tells us he was filled with delight and anticipation until finally a few days later he heard another voice telling him that the ship to take him was ready. With great excitement, and convinced that God would guide him, he fled from the mountain where he had spent six lonely years. He then traveled two hundred miles until he reached the eastern shore of Ireland and the ship which was to take him home. After some negotiation with the captain of the ship, Patrick boarded. The youth who came to Ireland left it a grown man.
Yet getting back to his home was not an easy task, and it took some time and determination before he finally reached his family. But Patrick would always have determination and fortitude. His family welcomed him and celebrated his return, as they had not expected ever to see him again. They also made him promise never to leave them again. He assured them that he did not intend to do so. The man who was an urban youth tells us he was glad to be back home. He settled back into the old lifestyle and thanked God for returning him safely to the land of his birth. The story could have ended here, but it does not.
Time passed and Patrick grew older, but Ireland and the memory of the Irish would not go away so easily. The truth was that he had fallen in love with this island and the people who had once enslaved him. Memories of his life there did not leave him. The feast days with their emphasis on merriment in the form of storytelling, music, and poetry had filled the young Patrick with the belief that these Irish were at heart a good people, even if they were not Christian. Father Frank Fahey of Ballintubber Abbey, who has spent his life studying the life and world of Patrick, describes the Irish of this time as "a very religious people. They had their sacred mountains; they had their liturgies around the wells. There was this presence of the divine in everything. Whether it was the gods, the energies, the spirits, whether it was the embodiment of the chief deity, the sun, whatever it was, they had this sense of religion, spirituality." It is easy to understand why Patrick, with his own Christian background, would be drawn to these people with the idea of bringing his deity to them.
A few years later Patrick himself was ordained a priest, and it was around this time that he tells of a strange experience. Again in his own words he describes how one night he saw a man coming to him in a vision. The man was Irish in appearance, and he gave Patrick a letter which was headed "The Voice of the Irish." Confused but curious over what this meant, Patrick read the letter and said that he could almost hear the voices of the people of Killala Bay speaking to him and pleading with him to return and be with them. He was deeply moved by this request and could not finish reading, but he knew one thing—he would go back to Ireland and bring the message of Christianity with him.
According to later Irish annals, in 432 Patrick arrived back in Ireland to convert the people to Christianity.* In spite of his later reputation, Patrick was not the first to bring the message of Christianity to Ireland. A year before Patrick is said to have arrived, another missionary, Palladius, was sent by the pope to bring the Irish to the Christian faith. There are also references to many others who traveled to Ireland to bring in the new religion. Christian missionaries were fairly widespread in Ireland at the time, but Patrick played an important role in the spread of the new faith among the Irish.
The Irish converted to Christianity without the bloodshed and martyrdom which was de rigueur with conversion elsewhere. How or why it happened this way no one knows for sure. The Irish seemed to have accepted this new deity without a struggle. Probably many factors were involved in the process, but Patrick himself was a clever theologian as were many of the early Christians when it came to introducing the new ideas to pagan people. In his Confession he declares, "I have kept faith with the heathens among whom I live and I will continue to keep it." Patrick did not try to stamp out the earlier rituals but rather cleverly blended them with Christian theology. He was fully aware of how the older religion was connected with the seasons and the changes in nature and sought to combine Christian teaching with these elements.
On a spring morning in Glenstall Abbey in County Limerick, Brother Sean O'Duinn stood near the forest surrounding the abbey and talked to us of the pagan religion that Patrick encountered when he came to Ireland. "You can say that it was bound up with nature, that the Celts spoke of the elemental gods that were concerned with earth, air, fire and water." This contrasted with Christianity. "When you think about it, almost from the beginning Christianity was mainly an urban religion" and not concerned with the changing seasons and nature. It was Patrick's willingness to bring these two different forces together that made him a success at the work of conversion. He did not ask the Irish to forsake their old beliefs but was happy to allow them to blend it all together. This philosophy is explained by him in the Confession. Taking the image of the sun, which was worshipped by the Irish, he incorporates that into Christian thinking and belief: "For the sun is that which we see rising daily at His command, but it will never reign, nor will its splendor last forever. And all those who worship it will be subject to grievous punishment. We, however, worship the true sun, Christ, who will never perish." In this way he wove the older icon into the newer Christian one. Patrick artfully allowed the pagan Irish to hold onto some of their old ways but encouraged them to see the icons in another, Christian, light. This convergence of old and new religions was so widespread in the conversion of Ireland to Christianity that hundreds of years later many pagan practices were still quite common. Many have survived to the present day. The reciting of a Christian rosary around a rag tree, for example, is still a common practice throughout Ireland. Rag trees are believed to have powers of healing and are invoked by the hanging of a rag or garment belonging to the person being prayed for.
Patrick traveled mostly throughout northern Ireland in his missionary work. He left no direct record of where he went, so he cannot with certainty be connected with the establishment of any particular church. Later writings on the travels and exact missionary work of Patrick cannot be verified, but he founded many churches including possibly one at Armagh, which was later to become the most important ecclesiastic center in Ireland.
There is no consensus about the date when Patrick died. The Ulster annals state that it was in 492, but the Inisfallen annals say it was in 496, on March 17. In any case, at his death Patrick was just one of many who had been a part of bringing Christianity to Ireland. In truth he never felt at home in Ireland and described the Irish as being "foreigners" to him in his letter to Coroticus, the only other document surviving besides his own simple biography. He wrote this letter on behalf of his converts who were being persecuted by this soldier and his agents, and even taken into slavery. It is believed that Coroticus was a British Roman petty tyrant who appears to have come to the eastern part of Ulster in search of bounty. In the letter Patrick is angry at him and full of anguish for the people he converted who have been mistreated by Coroticus. Patrick's anguish unleashes a whole stream of emotion. He says, in the same letter, that in Ireland he is a "stranger and an exile" from his own homeland. Even though he loved the Irish enough to spend his life converting them to Christianity, he never appears to have felt entirely at home there. In a sense he saw his mission as a kind of martyrdom.
We know that Patrick had not been the only figure involved in the conversion of the Irish to Christianity and that there were many others who came before and after him. Yet Patrick became the great symbol of Ireland, and others who did similar missionary work are forgotten. How did his name become forever associated with the Irish and the coming of Christianity to Ireland? The answer lies in what happened politically some two hundred years after his death.
By the seventh century the monasteries throughout Ireland were competing with each other for status and wealth. The church in Armagh in Ulster, in the northern part of the country, was one of the most ambitious in the Irish church. It wanted to be the primary center of Christianity in Ireland. It claimed to have been founded by Patrick and began to boost him as the primary missionary of the Irish. There is no direct evidence connecting Patrick with Armagh, but so successful was the propaganda linking the two that to the present day Patrick is known as the founding saint. Two "lives" of Patrick, written by Muirchu and Tirechan in the late seventh century, invented myths and exaggerated his importance. Charlie Do-herty says that it was Muirchu who "endowed Patrick with the attributes of a secular hero and ensured that the cult [of Patrick] was elevated to that of a national apostle." Both Muirchu and Tirechan were writing in the interests of Armagh two hundred years after the saint's death and are not considered by scholars to be legitimate sources. But their work played a major role in the development of the cult of Patrick.
Muirchu was a successful propagandist who established the legend of Patrick as the sole converter of the Irish to Christianity. He also established the myth that the Christian church in Ireland was founded exclusively by Patrick. Muirchu succeeded not only in elevating Patrick but he also did a pretty good job in denigrating Tara, which he describes as an Irish Babylon. This denouncement of the most revered of pre-Christian holy sites was done of necessity to enhance Christianity and declare Armagh as the rightful center of Irish spirituality. Tara, with its pagan associations, had to be put down. Muirchu even invented a druid who, in pre-Christian times, foretells at the palace of Tara the coming of a great missionary who will destroy "evil" paganism and all of its gods. With the same ingenuity Patrick's confrontations with druids were exaggerated and downright invented. But the myths were so shrewdly written and often so cleverly detailed in their invention that Patrick was seen as the great Christian hero who vanquished the representatives of paganism and took over as the great new symbol of Christianity. In fact, confrontations with druids were a rarity for the Christian missionaries to Ireland. We know that the Irish converted to Christianity without the type of martyrdom associated with conversion in the rest of Europe, and there are no records of confrontations of the sort described by the mythmakers. But the myths were powerful and popular. They were so successful that Patrick did eventually become the superhero of early Irish Christianity.
The church of Armagh had another reason to proclaim supremacy. It claimed to have Patrick's relics. Later it was Downpatrick in County Down that was credited with the status of having the saint's body buried there. In fact no one really knows where Patrick is buried, but it was around this time that relics of saints were becoming an important way of attracting pilgrims. Pilgrimage was something like modern-day tourism. It was a way the monasteries had of making money, and many of them depended on the income they earned from this enterprise. The more pilgrims a monastery could attract, the wealthier it became. Armagh, along with other northern churches, was in direct contact with Rome and managed to convince the Roman authorities to send over to them relics of the church's chief saints. With the precious relics of internationally known saints, Armagh could advertise these as a way of attracting pilgrims. To add to the attraction, a special shrine was built to hold these relics. This gave a sense of uniqueness and authenticity. The pilgrims felt they were in the presence of something special and spiritually powerful.
As Armagh rose in importance, some smaller churches started to claim that they too had been founded by Patrick in order to place themselves under the protection of the growing power of Armagh. Many others were simply willing to recognize Armagh's supremacy and accept its authority in return for protection. These smaller churches and monasteries paid tribute, or taxes, to Armagh, which in turn added to the wealth of the monastery. As the power and influence of Armagh grew, Patrick's status as a cult figure also took on major importance. Patrick and Armagh were inexorably linked.
There was another influence in the development of the cult of Patrick. At this time the most powerful family in Ulster, the Uí Néill (later called O'Neill) were expanding their territory. The Uí Néill were the most ambitious and influential family in Ireland and would remain so until well into Elizabethan times. They systematically defeated some smaller dynasties and took over the area of Armagh. Thus Armagh now fell within their territory. The Uí Néill also claimed the high-kingship of Tara and had aspirations of being the most important dynasty in Ireland. There was a tradition of linking the high-kingship to the possession of the ancient site of Tara. So it was important that they claim rights over Tara. The high-kingship was not a position of absolute power as kingship was in the rest of Europe at the time, but it was nevertheless a prestigious position. The Uí Néill were determined to secure that prestige. They were also making their own province in Ulster the most important in Ireland, as this was certainly a way of declaring their own prominence to the whole island. If they were to be the primary dynasty in Ireland, their homeland would have to be the most important. Armagh, lying within Uí Néill territory, became part of that importance. They set about this task in a very systematic way by having their own annalists invent records of their successes and therefore their right to the Tara kingship. The Uí Néill were very clever at self-promotion. They managed to take over the hill of Tara, Ireland's ancient capital as it is sometimes called, and therefore declared themselves to be high-kings of Ireland. They had their scribes promulgate the importance of Tara and thus their right to the self-proclaimed title of high-king. The appellation "high-king" had no political significance but it did carry social prestige, and for centuries the Uí Néill considered themselves to be the most important dynasty in Ireland.
Today Tara is still an exposed and windswept place and has remained visually impressive. It is about thirty-five miles from Dublin. Once you get off the main Dublin/Navan road, the winding country road takes you right up to the site. Sitting on the grass on this ancient hill in County Meath on a windy spring day, Edel Bhreathnach talked to us about how the Uí Néill took over this ritual site and made it their own. Looking around at the wide view of surrounding counties, it is not hard to understand why this site was such an impressive one to the ancients. It feels like the top of the world. The Uí Néill annalists invented the story of their family ancestry in order to justify their claim to this most prestigious of ancient Irish sites and to the early high-kingship of Ireland. Edel described the Uí Néill political machine: "Well, the Uí Néill were absolute masters of propaganda. Indeed, such masters that we as historians are only beginning to unravel their propaganda which really began and was put together in the eighth century." Part of that propaganda was the promotion of both Patrick and Armagh. Having taken over the ancient pagan site of Tara, they also promoted their church at Armagh as being the center of Irish Christianity.
Sites associated with Patrick also grew abundantly in number. His missionary activity was greatly exaggerated. He would have had to have been a very energetic man to have climbed all the mountains and blessed all the wells associated with his name! The site of Croagh Patrick (Patrick's Mountain) is just one example of the growth of the Patrick cult. Croagh Patrick is in modern-day County Mayo in the west of Ireland and was once under the jurisdiction of the powerful Armagh. Each year at the end of July thousands of pilgrims climb the mountain associated with Patrick, attempting to emulate his climb and thereby earn penance and remission from sin. Many walk in bare feet—most starting out at dawn. It is quite a sight. But few of the people who make the climb realize how old a ritual this is and that the roots of Croagh Patrick go very far back in time. In fact they go back before the time of Patrick.
Many modern-day pilgrims at Croagh Patrick might wonder and marvel at Patrick's ability to climb such a difficult terrain. The truth is there is no evidence that Patrick ever visited the site, much less climbed the mountain. Scholars doubt he was ever there. The name of Patrick was "imposed" on the hill around the year 8oo, according to historian Peter Harbison. The church knew that it was an important pre-Christian ritual site and wanted to claim it for Christianity. Scholars believe that the mountain was once the domain of the Celtic god Lugh, whose feast day was August i. This may be the reason that the annual climb is on the last Sunday in July. This date falls within the pagan feast time of Lúnasa. Peter Harbison also points out the sense of festival and fun about the modern pilgrimage. "I think what we are seeing in Croagh Patrick, is a Christianization, a very diplomatic Christianization of an old pagan festival in honor of the good god Lugh. And if you look at the pilgrims to this very day who climb Croagh Patrick, you notice that there are also a lot of young people who are telling stories and laughing as they go up and down," very much in the tradition of the older pagan feast day.
Patrick remains a strong and very real figure for us. His surviving texts give him this credibility. His words connect us to him in a way that is vibrant and surprisingly immediate, given the amount of time that has passed since his death. It really is quite extraordinary that his autobiography, written in the fifth century, serves as a testament of his own personal experiences with Ireland and the Irish. His writings are unique in that they are the only surviving manuscripts that describe Christian missionary work outside the boundaries of the mighty Roman Empire. Patrick is a singular voice coming to us in words that express his humanity, his humility, and his personal struggle to spread the Christian gospel to a people he first lived among as a slave.
A striking aspect of his personal writings is that Patrick is never conceited when he speaks. In fact he is reticent and uncertain about his own abilities because, as he explains, "I have not the education of others, who have absorbed to the full both law and sacred scripture alike, and who have never, from infancy onward, had to change to another language but rather could perfect the language they had." The education he missed while he was a slave in Ireland haunted him all his life. He never felt that he caught up with his classmates in spite of the fact that he went on with his education and was ordained a priest. In his writings he humbly apologizes for his poor Latin. Patrick's own language would have been a vulgar form of Latin, which would have been polished had he remained at school and not been taken into slavery in Ireland. He is conscious of the fact that he did not learn Latin grammar and syntax as a boy. Instead he found himself among the Gaelic-speaking Irish as a slave struggling to understand their foreign language. He also refers to his own "lack of knowledge and slow speech." Patrick apparently had a stammer. With all of these apparent obstacles in his path, it is remarkable that he persisted. He writes that his Confession "may not be elegant but it is assuredly and most powerfully written on your hearts not with ink but with the spirit of the living God." The interesting thing about this passage is that it is a paraphrase of Paul's "Letter to the Corinthians." Obviously in spite of how little schooled he felt himself to be, Patrick was very familiar with the scriptures. Even at a distance of almost sixteen hundred years we can feel the gentle and self-doubting nature of the man. Fortitude may have been a part of Patrick's nature, but arrogance never was.
Although he was not the sole converter of the Irish that later documents would have us believe, his dedication to the Irish cannot be doubted. What kind of companion was he? He was probably not the kind of fellow who would sit around the community fire at night swapping stories. He was not Irish, after all, and by his own testimony declares that he always felt like an outsider in Ireland. His infamous mythological rebuttal of the pagan hero Oisín tells us just how stern storytellers considered him to be. We can only imagine how he must have shaken his head in wonder at the Irish propensity to enjoy a good time. But the letter he wrote to Coroti-cus in defense of his own converts is remarkable in its sincerity, tenderness, and the earnestness it expresses. In this letter Patrick cries out, "I grieve for you; I grieve, my most loved ones!" on hearing that some of his Irish converts have been robbed and killed by these British bounty hunters whom he describes as "rebels against Christ."
Armagh triumphed and finally emerged as the most important church in Ireland. So successful was the promotion of Armagh that to the present day both the Roman Catholic church and the Protestant Church of Ireland each have their primacies there. Two large cathedrals stand against the sky, one Protestant and one Catholic, both named after St. Patrick and both claiming descent from the saint. Summing up the phenomenon of both Patrick and his relationship with Armagh, Charlie Doherty says, "It was good fortune and astute politics, rather than any status conferred on it by Patrick, that allowed Armagh to emerge as the most important church in Ireland by the end of the seventh century." With the emergence of Armagh as the principal ecclesiastical center of Ireland came the cult of Patrick, which has survived down the centuries to the present day. This cult has gone far beyond the domain of Christianity. Patrick is now the symbol of universal Irishness and in that role he seems to be unshakable. In modern terms his feast day has more to do with national or ethnic identity than religion.
Does it really matter if most of what we hear of St. Patrick is simply fable or clever invention? His own writings are enough to tell us that he was humble, self-effacing, and persistent in his mission. He was a gentle and sincere man who gave his life to Ireland and the Irish. His elevation to the status of Ireland's chief apostle may be the cleverest piece of propaganda to come out of early Irish Christianity, but Patrick never sought this status for himself. He would probably be amazed at how his name has been remembered.
The celebration of the feast day of St. Patrick has been going on since the ninth century. Irish scholars who traveled and settled on the European continent all that time ago are credited with starting the tradition, possibly as a way of staying linked to their homeland. Even then Patrick had already become a symbol of Ireland to those exiles far from its shores. Nowadays many of the Irish at home and around the world who celebrate St. Patrick's Day on March 17 probably do not realize just how ancient a tradition this celebration really is. They are repeating a pattern first started almost twelve hundred years ago. In referring to the modern parade and the enormous worldwide celebration of St. Patrick, Charlie Do-herty said: "The very idea of this huge celebration is something I don't think could have been contemplated even in the wildest dreams of the people who created the myth of Patrick in the first place." St. Patrick's Day is a rallying point for Irishness and a good excuse to have a party—and, in a twist of irony, it is probably true to say that it has become more of a pagan feast than a Christian holy day.
*This date is based on annals written one hundred years after Patrick. Consequently, it is more likely to have served political needs than to be historically accurate.