St. Patrick’s Day draws near, and with it the perennial question of how best to remember this most revered Irish saint. With the Irish scattered since the middle of the 19th century across the world, there is by now remarkable global diversity in how the day is marked.
Few Irish people associate the day with corned beef and cabbage, which comes to mind for many Americans of Irish descent. Chicago famously dyes its river green on March 17, but the only time Dublin considered doing the same to its River Liffey, the arrival of Covid-19 saw the parade cancelled. Guinness seems by now a universal constant to the global celebration, even as green shakes from a famous fast food chain are catching on even in Ireland.
Tens of thousands of tourists flock to Ireland each year for the St. Patrick’s Day Festival. But in the midst of the concerts, parades and art installations, one figure is strikingly absent—Patrick himself. The festival this year features a walking tour of Dublin’s trees, a cross-border youth orchestra and a fairytale about a king who demands “normality,” but no dedicated event that engages with the historical or religious significance of the man whose name defines the day.
Historically, the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland involved a rich tapestry of folk practices, some religious, some more secular. Few of those traditions are maintained in today’s official festivities. (The organizers of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day Festival declined the opportunity to be interviewed for this piece.)
It may be the case that by neglecting to include Patrick’s real story, the festival is not only cutting itself off from historical truth but also ignoring a significant economic and cultural opportunity that, Irish tourism experts point out, other countries have been eager to develop. Pilgrimage tourism is a growing sector in Ireland, attracting visitors seeking a deeper engagement with heritage. David Ross, who runs a walking center in West Cork, sees the demand firsthand.
“The vast majority of people who come are in their 50s and onwards, and they have a kind of latent spirituality,” he said. “They wonder if walking a pilgrim path would help them get a fresh insight into a spiritual route.”
John O’Dwyer, chairman of Pilgrim Paths Ireland, believes Ireland is missing a major opportunity. “No other saint—no other national figure—has the same global profile as Patrick,” he said. “The whole world celebrates him, but we don’t connect that to our pilgrim past.”
Spain, he pointed out, recognized the value of religious tourism early and developed the Camino de Santiago into a world-famous route. In Ireland “our [pilgrim] paths predate the Camino,” Mr. O’Dwyer said, “but Spain had the vision to develop it. We didn’t.” He believes that with a strong marketing campaign, Patrick’s legacy could attract a significant number of visitors, just as the Irish government’s “Wild Atlantic Way” initiative, which highlighted the nation’s 1,600 mile coastline, revitalized tourism.
He noted that drawing on religious sources like the heroic life of St. Patrick would not necessarily exclude non-religious viewpoints in contemporary Ireland. Mr. O’Dwyer pointed out that many of Ireland’s pilgrim paths evolved from earlier pagan practices, and he called Patrick, in particular, a “unifying figure.” Mr. Ross agrees, suggesting that the state could “use the St. Patrick’s Day festival as a kind of launching pad” to grow the pilgrimage tourist sector.
Salvador Ryan is professor of Ecclesiastical History at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University in Maynooth. Responding over email, he wrote that he was “not overly bothered by the proliferation of legends surrounding the saint” and doesn’t take a “killjoy” attitude to the other events that might be organized around March 17. But he allows that promoting Patrick simply for the purposes of tourism risks “perpetuating the carnival image of the saint that we have become so familiar with” and in the end obscuring “the truly historical significance of the figure of Patrick.”
Apart from his mythic association with snakes or the shamrock, modern Irish actually know something about the historic Patrick because we have some of his writings—the “Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus” and his famous “Confessio.” From that biographical letter, we discover he was raised in a British Roman family and was kidnapped and trafficked to Ireland as a slave at the age of 16.
He escaped after six years and was reunited with his family. But to their dismay, he felt called to return to the land of his captivity and to share the Gospel message with them. Mr. Ryan is clear that these documents do not just reveal details about this missionary’s life but are an important window into Irish society in the fifth century. The narrative is “simply unique: the story of a Roman citizen who was taken into slavery outside the empire in one of the lands of the ‘barbarians’ and who lived to tell the tale.”
As he sees it, the historic Patrick has had a series of afterlives where different elements of Irish society have presented a version of the saint that fit their contemporary needs. Whether it was his seventh century biographers or 17th century Protestant missionaries, Patrick has served as a figure on whom different narratives can be projected.
Patrick’s story gains new relevance when we examine his real life in detail. Mr. Ryan suggests that Patrick embodies a humility that we can learn from. He “never denied his own human frailty,” no doubt why he begins his most famous work with the words, “Ego Patricius, peccator” (“I, Patrick, a sinner…”). Patrick’s concern for justice is evident throughout his writings, most especially when he bravely stands up against the slave-trader, Coroticus.
But it is Patrick’s identity as an outsider who makes his home in Ireland that has a potent significance in the now as Irish society wrestles with questions of how to integrate increasing diversity in its population. “If nothing else,” Mr. Ryan said, “the historic Patrick reminds us that a land can be changed for the better by listening to voices from afar, and that an immigrant, once considered foreign, can become one of the most well-known symbols of Irish identity.”
The Most Rev. Kevin Doran is the bishop of Elphin, a diocese in the northwest of Ireland that enjoys deep links to the historical St. Patrick. The first bishop of the diocese was St. Asicus, a silversmith and disciple of Patrick.
Bishop Doran regularly returns to Patrick’s writing and is moved by his “pastoral love for people.” He gets a sense reading texts like the “Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus” that the stand Patrick took against the war lord was “coming straight out of his heart, not just his head.” This reminds him of what a bishop is called to be.
Bishop Doran expressed no real misgivings about the official events organized in Dublin to mark St. Patrick’s Day, and he certainly does not wish for the church to be seen to be playing “the misery card” if some take note that the festival schedule seems determined to avoid any hint of the real Patrick.
But what does trouble him are depictions of Patrick as “some mythic character that came out of the mists of time” instead of a real person with a profound relevance for Irish society today. “Patrick is British, for want of a better word, who was kidnapped by the Irish, and now he’s actually standing up to a British chieftain—Coroticus—defending the right of the Irish not to be held captive in Scotland.”
He suspects that the failure to acknowledge the religious and historical elements of Patrick’s story is an expression of a sort of collective insecurity. He notes how other European nations that no one would dispute are comfortably secular are able to officially welcome and value the expression of religious belief in public.
He remembers being in Europe, perhaps Munich or Innsbruck, for the feast of the Sacred Heart. “All the brass bands were out,” he said. “The foresters were there with their pruning hooks over their shoulders. The women were there with their baskets of flowers.
“It was not just something celebrated in the church, but it was brought out onto the street.” What that demonstrates, he argued, is a society that is not “ashamed” of the reality of religious belief among their citizens.
He argued that there is a tendency in parts of official Ireland to resist all rich expressions of personal belief. It is not just Catholicism that is targeted, but a wider trend to “reduce the value of all values,” so that “you’re not supposed to hold any views strongly.”
This secular minimization of belief is a problem not just for Catholics but for many who have come to be known as “the New Irish.” Immigrant communities are disproportionately religious compared with the wider Irish population.
Bishop Doran notes: “Many of our immigrants have deep religious commitment…. They sort of look at us and say, ‘Where's the energy?’”
It is a reminder to the church, as the festival of St. Patrick gets underway, that the task to which Patrick devoted himself remains urgent in our day. “The primary purpose for the existence of the church is to make disciples,” he said, “and that’s what Patrick was about.” The absence of the historical Patrick from the official celebrations should be a wake-up call to Irish Christians. “Patrick was a dynamic Christian inspired by the faith of the apostles and prepared to lay down his own life,” Bishop Doran said. Christians today can carry on that commitment.
And in Patrick’s concern for community, contemporary Irish people are offered a road map for beginning that task. Looking at faith through Patrick’s eyes, Bishop Doran said, we discern “that because God is a communion, therefore we also must be in communion with one another…we have to act in a way which reflects the solidarity of God.”
That would make a far richer legacy than one any parade or concert might manage.
