St Patrick

It is said that Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, went to his grave at the age of 120 regretting some unspecified act or offence he had carried out in the course of his life – something he felt had offended the Christian education he had received as a child.

Nobody is certain what he had in mind, but there is increasing circumstantial evidence that the source of his anxiety was the series of events that led him to save Ireland from pagan perdition and the awful consequences that have since ensued.

The story goes that Patrick, born on either the north coast of France or the west coast of Scotland, was carried off by Irish pirates as a young boy and sold to be the slave of a pagan Irish chieftain called Milcho. For six gruelling years Patrick minded Milcho’s sheep on the bleak hills, until a voice from heaven told him it was time to go home. He ran away and made his way to the coast, where he found a ship and embarked on his journey back to France or Scotland.

Some years later, he experienced a vision in which the Irish people beseeched him to return and teach them the true faith. He studied for the priesthood and afterwards spent another thirty-eight years preparing for his mission. On returning to Ireland, nearly fifty years after his departure, Patrick was set upon by a band of fierce men. History does not recall that they were dressed in leprechaun hats and singing ‘Ole, ole, ole’, although nor is there any evidence to reassure us otherwise. Dichu, the leader of this band of savages, raised his axe to kill Patrick, but his arm became stiff so he could not complete the manoeuvre. He fell upon his knees and was converted. After that, Patrick went all over the place, converting all and sundry from the evils of drunkenness and debauchery, encountering many trials and adventures along the way.

For centuries, Irish people appear to have remained oblivious to the reality that, in praying to God, they have been pretty much wasting their time. It is neither widely known nor comprehended, in Ireland or elsewhere, that, in a deal with God, Patrick managed to negotiate the right to be the judge of the entire Irish race on Judgement Day. This agreement followed after Patrick’s legendary Lenten penance atop the Mayo mountain nowadays known as Croagh Patrick, where he prayed for what seemed the impossible objective of saving Ireland’s incorrigible population from eternal damnation. As Easter dawned, God sent an angel to tell Patrick that his prayer had been answered: that he had, in accordance with his request, been deputed to dispense judgement to all Irish citizens on the Last Day.

It seems a strange thing to ask for. The implication, clearly, was that Patrick believed that he could successfully convert and reform the savage race whose spiritual condition had become his sole responsibility. There is no recorded evidence that Patrick regretted his decision to ask God to charge him with this onerous role and invest him with all the attendant powers. But one obvious way of interpreting his reported anxiety concerning the unspecified act of folly or error that he felt had somehow blighted his life is that he had another vision in which he foresaw how his own feast day would pan out and came to realize the enormity of the horror he had spawned and brought upon himself.

Perhaps, in that vision, he had an opportunity to see the downstream confluence of consequences arising from him becoming the Patron Saint of Ireland and acquiring the responsibility for the ultimate destiny of every Irish man and woman who ever lived. Since we have no reason to believe that Patrick was other than a sensitive and gentle soul, that possibility should seem neither remote nor surprising.

St Patrick’s Day is now the greatest horror Ireland has ever inflicted on itself and the world, a cultural atrocity with no equivalents in even the most grotesque excesses of other nations and peoples, large or small. St Patrick’s Day is the day when an uncontrolled explosion of national imbecility is set off in the middle of every main street and town square, and an unspeakable parody of Irish national identity is played out in a haze of alcohol. Nowadays popularly referred to as Paddy’s Day, 17 March is when we Irish get in touch with our inner leprechauns and pretend that, in portraying ourselves as lump eejits, we are being ironic. Drinking twenty pints of Guinness and vomiting in the Liffey may not be most people’s idea of a good time, but on St Patrick’s Day these become the quintessential rituals of the celebration of Irish national identity. On the day we mark in honour of the man who saved us from pagan debauchery, it is impossible to go about in public and not be accosted by men wearing ridiculous green hats, while being aurally assaulted by public address systems playing skondonktious ballads performed by be-geansied caricatures with wet brains and facial twitches.

By dint of some sick hallucination having imposed itself on our cultural understanding, these events are deemed to denote something called ‘Irishness’, though of course this miasma of Paddywhackery derives not from anything even vaguely related the reality of the Irish personality, but from a national imagination seriously compromised by the effects of ethyl alcohol. Above all, of course, ‘Paddy’s Day’ is National Batter Day, the day it is considered an act of patriotism to get hammered. Asked while on a visit to the United States for St Patrick’s Day 2010 what advice he would give to Irish-Americans on their national feast day, the then Taoiseach Brian Cowen replied: ‘As I always say, take it easy early in the day. It’s a long day.’

It is assumed that this now worldwide manifestation of buckleppery has its origins in Ireland, but in fact it began in the contorted imaginations of the exiled Irish in America and spread outwards from there. Although outsiders who take their understanding of Ireland from the global celebrations of our national feast day seem to imagine that Irish citizens go about every day, sporting green pantaloons and emitting ejaculations like ‘Top o’ the morning to ye all begorrah and but faith it’s a fine day we do be having I do declare to me God’, the truth is that this version of the Irish personality is a very recent import into the home country and is primarily the fault of St Patrick.

Everything about it is fake. ‘Paddy’s Day’ is a day when there is no escape from the grotesque and monstrous abomination called ‘The Craic’, which, like almost everything else about our ‘authentic’ Irish identity, has been recovered from the cultural skip of our next-door neighbours. There is no Irish word ‘craic’ – the word is ‘crack’ and it is pure Anglo-Saxon. And this hints at what each one of us knows already at heart – that all of the things we parade on St Patrick’s Day are grossly distorted versions of imported notions of who and what we are supposed to be like. The shamroguery and the buckleppery derive not from anything in Irish tradition or the national character, but from the grief-distorted sentimentalism of the Irish-American diaspora. But the native Paddy, with his finely tuned sense of how to relieve foreigners of their hard currency, has thrown himself into the exercise of self-caricature with relish and abandon.

Until a few years ago, certainly until the commencement of the increasingly unspeakable period formerly known as the Celtic Tiger, the native Irish on St Patrick’s Day sported a discreet sprig of shamrock, and otherwise displayed no outward signs of what is nowadays called ‘Irishness’. For those Irish who remained in their home country, St Patrick’s Day was among the most dismal days in the Irish calendar, a day to endure before the onset of spring, a final penitential rite before shaking off the gloom of winter and embracing the hope of Easter.

But, feeling somewhat abashed as a result of watching televised reports of the parades in New York and Philadelphia, we decided, around the turn of the millennium, to get in on the act. Now we go about the place on our national feast day acting as if we ourselves have swallowed the most gruesome version of ourselves and turned a sickly green. The rest of the year we feel free to be outraged if some foreigner calls us Paddies, but on St Patrick’s Day we are determined to indulge in a self-mockery that, were it inflicted on us by others, would result in a class action for mass ridicule and racist provocation, and to disport ourselves in public as the People that Taste Forgot.

On reflection, it seems obvious why Saint Patrick went to his grave a worried man. Perhaps he had come to realize the impossibility of the task he had set himself and had caught a glimpse, in some distracted vision, of what his well-intentioned endeavours had inflicted on the world to the end of time. Even worse is the prospect that, when he finally gets to challenge Paddy with the sins committed in the name of national celebration, he will be told that the whole thing was done in his own honour. Paddy, as usual, will hope for a fool’s pardon and that will enable him to stagger through the pearly gates wearing a green hat and an orange beard, shouting ‘Top o’ the mornin’’ to the Almighty.