Patrick in Irish Identity

No figure is more bound up with the idea of Ireland than Patrick. From medieval national apostle to the green-clad icon of a global March festival, his name has carried Irish identity across the island and through the diaspora. Yet the man behind the brand — a humble Romano-British former slave who left two anguished Latin tracts — is almost a stranger to the popular figure who bears his name.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Celtic) / Orthodox reception

The National Apostle

Ireland honours three national patron saints: Patrick, Brigid of Kildare, and Columba (Colum Cille) of Iona. Of these, Patrick is by far the pre-eminent — the national apostle, credited in tradition with the conversion of the island and venerated as the founder of the Irish church (Britannica, “Saint Patrick”). Brigid and Columba hold their places of honour, but it is Patrick whose name has been made to stand, almost alone, for Ireland itself.

This pre-eminence is a long inheritance. Already in the seventh century, the Armagh propagandists who composed the earliest Lives — Muirchú and Tírechán — were building Patrick into a single, dominant founder figure with jurisdictional claims over the whole island, a project examined elsewhere in this collection (see The Later Hagiography). By the later Middle Ages and into the early-modern period, Patrick had become the unrivalled symbol of Irish Christianity, and through it of Irishness as such. When Irish identity needed a patron, it reached for Patrick.

His liturgical feast falls on 17 March, the traditional date of his death. In Ireland the day is a holy day of obligation and, since the twentieth century, a public holiday — a religious observance and a marker of national belonging at once. For most of its history, the day in Ireland itself was a relatively quiet, devotional affair: Mass, the wearing of a sprig of shamrock, a pause in Lenten austerity. The great public spectacle now associated with the date did not begin at home. It began abroad.

The Diaspora and the Parade

The St Patrick’s Day parade — the procession, the bands, the public display — is an invention of the Irish diaspora, not of Ireland (Cronin and Adair, The Wearing of the Green, 2002). It grew up among Irish emigrants and Irish soldiers overseas, above all in colonial and early America, where displaced communities used the saint’s day to assert a collective identity in a new land.

The earliest documented observances are American. In Boston, the Charitable Irish Society held a commemoration of St Patrick in 1737 — a gathering organised, notably, by Ulster Presbyterian emigrants, to assist distressed Irishmen in the city (IrishCentral, “Oldest St Patrick’s Day celebration”). This was an organised observance rather than a parade in the modern sense. The first recorded parade is generally placed in New York in 1762, when Irish-born soldiers serving in the British Army marched through lower Manhattan on the saint’s day (History.com, “St Patrick’s Day Parade History”; “March 17, 1762: First Recorded St Patrick’s Parade”).

[Disputed:] The title of “first St Patrick’s Day parade” is genuinely contested among several American cities. Boston (1737) and New York (1762) are the most commonly cited, but they describe different things — a society’s commemoration versus a soldiers’ march — and other claimants exist. St Augustine, Florida, has more recently advanced a claim to a procession in 1601, far predating the others (St Augustine Celtic Festival, “Oldest St Patrick celebration”). The competing claims rest on differing definitions of what counts as a “parade,” and no single origin point can be asserted as fact.

What is not disputed is the underlying pattern: the celebration as public, festive spectacle was forged in the diaspora and only later carried home. The phenomenon belongs to the wider story of Irish emigrant memory traced in Legend and National Memory — a people remembering, and performing, a homeland through its saint.

The Modern Secular Festival

In emigrant America the day was steadily transformed from a religious feast into a largely secular celebration of “things Irish” — and, as Irish-American communities grew in numbers and political weight, into ever larger and more elaborate parades (Britannica, “Saint Patrick’s Day”). Over the twentieth century this secularised, festive form spread back across the Atlantic and around the world.

Ireland itself embraced the public festival comparatively late, and self-consciously. The modern Dublin St Patrick’s Festival is a deliberate creation of the mid-1990s: established by the Government of Ireland in November 1995, it staged its first festival on 17 March 1996, expressly intended to showcase Irish culture and “to project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country” (St Patrick’s Festival, “About Us”). What had begun centuries earlier as an emigrant assertion of identity returned home as a state-sponsored cultural and tourist event.

Globally, the day has become a heavily commercial and secular festival. National and civic landmarks are floodlit green — “the greening” of everything from the Chicago River to public buildings worldwide; green beer, the shamrock, and the leprechaun furnish a recognisable kitsch; and “drowning the shamrock” — the custom of dropping a sprig of shamrock into a final drink — has become shorthand for the day’s conviviality. It is a celebration of Irishness at planetary scale, and it is a very long way from a Lenten holy day, and further still from the historical Patrick.

Symbol and Man

Patrick remains a genuinely unifying symbol — across the island, across confessional lines (the Boston society of 1737 was Presbyterian), and across a worldwide diaspora that has used him to remember and perform its origins. His image saturates Irish national and cultural life. This is real and worth stating plainly. But it should be stated for what it is: a cultural symbol, the legendary national apostle, doing the work that national symbols do.

For the gap at the heart of this file is wide. The popular Patrick — robed in green, mitred, crozier in hand, a shamrock raised to teach the Trinity, snakes streaming away before him — is the legendary Patrick: a figure assembled from the medieval Lives, the high-medieval miracle traditions, and early-modern and modern folklore. None of these signature emblems comes from Patrick himself. The shamrock-as-Trinity teaching is a late tradition; the banishing of snakes is folklore (Ireland having had no snakes to banish); even the green is a modern accretion, earlier associations with the saint having favoured blue.

The historical Patrick is recoverable from a single source: his own two short, raw, intensely personal Latin works, the Confessio and the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus (see The Two Authentic Writings). From them emerges a Romano-British Christian, seized as a teenager and enslaved in Ireland, who returned as a bishop and who described himself, without false modesty, as rusticissimus — “the most unlearned of all” — at the very opening of his confession (Confessio 1, confessio.ie). He is anxious, self-deprecating, defensive of a mission under attack, and wholly absorbed in God rather than in nation. There is no green, no mitre of legend, no shamrock, no snake.

The icon and the man are, in the end, almost strangers to one another. The figure the world celebrates on 17 March — the green-vested bishop of the parades — is the legendary Patrick, the creation of centuries of memory and commerce. The historical man survives only in two pages of his own troubled Latin, and it is there alone, not in the festival, that he can be met.

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