Things that get said about Ireland's past, checked against the evidence. Each one has a verdict: true, false, partly true, or disputed, where historians who work on the subject disagree. Every point links to where it was read. For the gods and heroes, see Irish mythology.
False: 5 · Disputed: 3 · Partly true: 4 · True: 1
There were no snakes to drive out.
Ireland was known as a land without snakes long before Patrick: the Roman writer Solinus noted it in the third century. Post-glacial Ireland never had snakes. Nigel Monaghan, keeper of natural history at the National Museum of Ireland, told National Geographic he had found no suggestion of snakes in Irish fossil collections or records.
The usual explanation is timing: Ireland lost its land bridge to Britain before snakes moved north after the Ice Age.
The story came later. The earliest text in which an Irish saint banishes snakes is Adomnán's Life of Columba (late 7th or early 8th century). The first to give the deed to Patrick is Jocelyn of Furness in the late 12th century, and Gerald of Wales, who repeated it in the early 13th, doubted it.
Sources: Wikipedia: Saint Patrick ↗ · National Geographic (2008): Why there are no snakes in Ireland, quoting Nigel Monaghan, National Museum of Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia: Fauna of Ireland ↗
On this site: St Patrick and the saints
He was a Romano-Briton, brought to Ireland as a slave.
In his own Confessio Patrick says he was taken from his home in Britain by Irish raiders at sixteen and held in Ireland for six years. His father Calpurnius was a decurion and deacon, his grandfather a priest. He came from a Romanised British family and would have spoken British Celtic and some Latin.
Where in Britain is not known. He names Bannavem Taburniae, which has never been securely identified; Birdoswald on Hadrian's Wall, Banwen in south Wales, sites in Somerset and, from a later tradition, the Dumbarton area have all been proposed.
Sources: Wikipedia: Saint Patrick ↗
On this site: St Patrick and the saints · St Patrick's Day
A tradition with no early evidence: the first link between Patrick and the shamrock is from 1675.
Nothing in Patrick's own writings or the early Lives mentions it. Writers of the 1500s and 1600s describe the Irish eating or wearing shamrock without connecting it to Patrick or the Trinity.
The first evidence of a link is on the St Patrick's coppers of 1675, which appear to show Patrick holding a shamrock as he preaches. It may record an older oral tradition, but no one can show that.
Sources: Wikipedia: Shamrock ↗
On this site: Irish symbols
Blue is the heraldic colour; 'St Patrick's blue' dates from 1783; green is old too.
Blue has the longer record in heraldry. A late-13th-century roll of arms shows a gold harp on blue for the king of Ireland, the arms of Ireland have had a blue (azure) field since at least Edward IV, and the state's arms and the presidential standard still do.
The blue called ‘St Patrick's blue’ is not ancient. It comes from the Order of St Patrick, founded in 1783, which needed a colour different from the Garter (dark blue) and the Thistle (green). Historians disagree about whether blue was a national colour before that: Jim Smyth treats the Order's colour as invented tradition, while others, including Peter Alter, have argued for it.
Green is not new either: in 1681 Thomas Dineley saw people wearing crosses of green ribbon in their hats on St Patrick's Day. Ireland has no legal national colour; green is the one in everyday use.
Sources: Wikipedia: St Patrick's blue ↗
On this site: Irish symbols
Irish indentured servants and convicts suffered, but that was not hereditary chattel slavery.
Tens of thousands of Irish people were sent to the Caribbean and the American colonies in the 17th century, some by choice under an indenture contract, some transported as prisoners, vagrants or convicts. Conditions could be brutal, and contemporaries sometimes called them ‘slaves’.
The difference is in law and in what came after. An indenture usually ran four to nine years; then the person was free, could own property and marry, and their children were born free. Enslaved Africans were held for life, and their children were born enslaved. Handler and Reilly call it misleading, if not wrong, to use the word ‘slave’ for Irish servants in early Barbados.
The modern ‘Irish slaves’ meme has circulated since at least the 1990s. The librarian and researcher Liam Hogan has traced how it is used to belittle the history of African American slavery, and how it hides the fact that some Irish people took part in the slave trade and profited from it. In 2016 a group of Irish historians and academics signed an open letter condemning the meme.
Sources: Wikipedia: Irish slaves myth ↗ · Liam Hogan, ‘Irish slaves’: the convenient myth (openDemocracy) ↗ · Hogan, McAtackney and Reilly, The Irish in the Anglo-Caribbean: servants or slaves? (History Ireland, 2016) ↗ · Bryan Fanning, Slaves to a myth (Dublin Review of Books) ↗
On this site: Emigration
Historians argued over how common it was. Newspaper ads with the phrase certainly existed.
In 2002 the historian Richard J. Jensen argued in the Journal of Social History that NINA was largely a myth of victimisation: printed notices were rare in America, and anti-Irish job discrimination was not a major factor.
In 2015 the same journal published a reply by Rebecca A. Fried, then a school student, who listed many job advertisements in American newspapers using the restriction, for clerks, bartenders, farm workers, coachmen, tailors and more. Most were from the 1840s, but she found examples as late as 1909, in Butte, Montana.
So the phrase was real and in print. How widespread it was, and how far it shaped Irish lives, is still argued over. Jensen's article and Fried's reply are both linked below.
Sources: Wikipedia: Anti-Irish sentiment (section on ‘No Irish need apply’) ↗ · Richard J. Jensen, ‘No Irish Need Apply’: A Myth of Victimization, Journal of Social History 36:2 (2002) ↗ · Rebecca A. Fried, No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions, Journal of Social History 49:4 (2015) ↗
On this site: The diaspora
Large quantities of food left Ireland. How much it could have saved is argued over.
Large amounts of food were shipped out of Ireland through the famine years. London refused to stop the exports, though it had closed the ports during the shortage of 1782–83. That refusal was an angry controversy at the time. Cecil Woodham-Smith called the export of food ‘indisputable’.
Historians argue about the context. Grain imports rose after spring 1847, and Wikipedia's account notes that at the height of the famine four times as much wheat was imported as exported, on top of the maize. James Donnelly calls the starving people and departing food ‘the most powerful image in the nationalist construct of the Famine’, and notes that most of the debate has used national totals rather than breaking them down by region or product.
Christine Kinealy has written that the famine ‘was neither inevitable nor unavoidable’. Cormac Ó Gráda rejects the charge of genocide and thinks a case of neglect is easier to make. The famine page covers this in more detail.
Sources: Wikipedia: Great Famine (Ireland), section ‘Food exports’ ↗ · History Ireland: Food exports from Ireland 1846–47 (further reading) ↗
On this site: The Great Famine
The monks mattered a great deal. ‘Saved civilisation’ is Thomas Cahill's popular thesis, not a scholarly consensus.
The phrase comes from Thomas Cahill's 1995 bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization, which argues that Irish monks almost single-handedly rebuilt European learning after the fall of Rome. Many newspapers and magazines reviewed it favourably; other reviewers gave qualified praise, rejected the main thesis outright, or saw bias in it.
The real part is solid. Irish monks founded monasteries across Britain and the Continent: Columba at Iona, and Columbanus at Luxeuil in France and Bobbio in Italy after 590. Irish scholars and scribes worked across Europe, and Columbanus is one of the earliest known Hiberno-Latin writers.
What critics object to is the claim that the Irish did it ‘single-handedly’, Cahill’s own phrase.
Sources: Wikipedia: How the Irish Saved Civilization ↗ · Wikipedia: Columbanus ↗ · Wikipedia: Hiberno-Scottish mission ↗
On this site: The saints · High crosses
They founded the town; Irish settlements came first.
The Viking settlement of about 841, Dyflin, grew into the Kingdom of Dublin, which by the 12th century had become Ireland’s principal settlement.
It took its name from an earlier Christian ecclesiastical settlement called Duibhlinn, ‘black pool’, after the pool where the Poddle met the Liffey. A Gaelic settlement, Áth Cliath, ‘ford of hurdles’, stood upriver near today's Father Mathew Bridge. Its name survives in Baile Átha Cliath.
Ptolemy's ‘Eblana’ of about AD 140 was once said to be Dublin, but that identification is now doubted.
Sources: Wikipedia: Dublin (history) ↗ · Wikipedia: History of Dublin ↗
On this site: County Dublin
Built in Belfast, registered in Liverpool, last called at Queenstown.
Harland and Wolff built the Titanic on Queen's Island in Belfast, and Thomas Andrews, the shipyard's chief naval architect, died in the sinking.
She belonged to the British White Star Line and was registered at Liverpool. In 1912 all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, so ‘Irish-built’ and ‘British ship’ are both accurate.
On the maiden voyage she called at Queenstown (now Cobh), the last port she reached.
Sources: Wikipedia: RMS Titanic ↗
On this site: Shipwrecks
No historical, genetic or anthropological research supports it.
When the Armada was wrecked in 1588, most of the Spaniards who reached the Irish shore alive were killed, handed over to English forces and executed, or returned to Spain. There was no surviving population to settle.
Wikipedia's article, citing its sources, finds no anthropological, historical or genetic support for the story.
Sources: Wikipedia: Black Irish (folklore) ↗
On this site: Shipwrecks
It is Irish-American. In Ireland it was bacon and cabbage.
Irish immigrants in America used corned beef in place of bacon in the late 19th century. Corned beef and cabbage is the Irish-American version of bacon and cabbage, and its link with St Patrick's Day comes from Irish-American culture.
Sources: Wikipedia: Corned beef ↗
On this site: St Patrick's Day
No conquest, but Roman goods certainly arrived. Drumanagh is argued over.
Rome never conquered Ireland. Whether Romans landed is less certain. The large promontory fort at Drumanagh, north Co. Dublin, has produced Roman artefacts. Some archaeologists suggest it was a bridgehead for a Roman campaign; others a trading post, or an Irish site that traded with Roman Britain.
Drumanagh has never been properly excavated, and many finds came from illegal metal-detecting, so the question is open. Fingal County Council bought the site in 2017.
Sources: Wikipedia: Drumanagh ↗
On this site: County Dublin
No. Ireland has had no snakes since the last Ice Age; the island was cut off from Britain before snakes spread north. The story is first attached to Patrick by Jocelyn of Furness in the late 12th century.
No. In his own Confessio he says he was taken from his home in Britain by Irish raiders at sixteen. He came from a Romano-British family; his exact birthplace is unknown.
Many Irish people were sent to the Caribbean and the American colonies as indentured servants or transported convicts in the 17th century, often in harsh conditions. Historians distinguish this from chattel slavery: indenture was for a fixed term and children were born free, while enslaved Africans were held for life and their children were born enslaved.
The phrase appeared in American newspaper job advertisements, mostly in the 1840s and as late as 1909, as Rebecca Fried documented in 2015. Richard Jensen had argued in 2002 that it was rare. How common it was is still debated.
Yes. Large quantities of food were exported, and London refused to stop it. Historians also point out that grain imports rose from 1847, and that most of the debate rests on national totals, not regional ones.
Ireland has no legal national colour. Green is the one used in practice. Blue is the heraldic colour of the arms of Ireland, and 'St Patrick's blue' comes from the Order of St Patrick, founded in 1783.
Think a verdict is wrong, or know a better source? Tell us.