Fourteen things nearly everyone gets wrong
None of these are meant to spoil anybody's day. Most are good stories — they are
simply younger than they are said to be, and where they came from is usually
more interesting than the version on the tea towel.
“Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland”
There were never any snakes
Post-glacial Ireland has never had snakes, and this was being noted as a curiosity by the Roman writer Solinus in the third century — two hundred years before Patrick. The banishing legend is not even his originally: the earliest Irish text about a saint driving out snakes is the Life of Colmcille, written in the late seventh or early eighth century. It is attached to Patrick only in the late twelfth century, by Jocelyn of Furness. Gerald of Wales repeated it a few decades later and was already sceptical.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“He used the shamrock to explain the Trinity”
First written down in 1726
The story appears in writing for the first time in 1726, some thirteen hundred years after Patrick, though it may have been told for a while before that. Nothing in his own writings mentions it. Three was a powerful number in pagan Ireland (the triple deities, the triskele) so the idea may have had ground to fall on, but the shamrock as a teaching aid is a legend, not a record.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Patrick was Irish”
He was a Roman Briton, and came here as a slave
He was born in Roman Britain to a Romano-British family (his father a deacon and town councillor, his grandfather a priest) and his first language was British Celtic. Irish raiders took him at sixteen and he herded animals here for six years before escaping. He came back years later by choice, to the country that had enslaved him. That is the part of the story worth keeping.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“It has always been green”
The saint's own colour is blue
Green ribbons and shamrock have been worn on the day since at least the 1680s, but when the Order of St Patrick was founded in 1783 it took blue as its colour — which is why St Patrick's blue exists at all. Green became the national colour through the United Irishmen in the 1790s and the song 'The Wearing of the Green'; Ireland was first called the Emerald Isle in a poem of 1795. The green you are wearing is political before it is religious.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“It's St Patty's Day”
Paddy. Always Paddy
The Irish is Pádraig, which gives the pet forms Páidín and Paddy. Patty is short for Patricia, which is a different name for a different person. Nobody in Ireland says Patty, and the mistake is the fastest way to mark a greeting as having come from somewhere else.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“The parade is an ancient Irish tradition”
The parades came home from America
Parades began among the diaspora in eighteenth-century North America and did not reach Ireland until the twentieth century. The first parade in Ireland was held in Waterford in 1903, and the first state-organised parade in Dublin was in 1931. Until the late twentieth century the day was a bigger occasion abroad than at home.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Corned beef and cabbage is the traditional dinner”
An Irish-American dish
It was adopted by Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century America, where beef was cheap. It is a genuine tradition (an Irish-American one, with its own real history) but it is not what was eaten in Ireland, and it is not what is eaten in Ireland now.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“The drinking is the oldest part of it”
The Irish state banned it for thirty-four years
The revelry has a religious root: 17 March falls in Lent, and the Lenten restrictions on food and drink are lifted for the feast. But the Free State government banned the sale of alcohol on St Patrick's Day in 1927, and the ban was not repealed until 1961 — so for a third of a century the pubs of Ireland were shut on the day the rest of the world now drinks to.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland”
Palladius was sent first, in 431
Prosper of Aquitaine's Chronicle records that Pope Celestine I sent Palladius as the first bishop to the Irish Christians in 431. Christians were already here for him to be bishop of. Saints such as Ciarán of Saigir, Auxilius, Secundinus and Iserninus are tied to early churches in Munster and Leinster. The annals put Patrick's arrival in 432, and that date was probably chosen to shrink Palladius's part and enlarge Patrick's. He became the apostle of Ireland in memory more than in strict chronology.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Patrick is buried under the stone at Downpatrick”
A tradition, never proven, and the stone dates from 1900
Tradition puts his grave on Cathedral Hill at Downpatrick, shared with Brigid and Colmcille, but this has never been proven. In 1196 the Norman lord John de Courcy announced that he had found the bones of all three saints and had them reburied in the cathedral, a discovery historians think he invented for political reasons. The slab of Mourne granite that marks the grave today was put there in 1900. Glastonbury in England claimed him as well.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“A pope made Patrick a saint”
He was never formally canonised
For most of Christianity's first thousand years saints were recognised by the local church, not by Rome. Patrick never went through a papal canonisation, and his standing as a saint rests on that early local recognition. The Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and Orthodox churches all keep his day. The Russian Orthodox Church added him to its calendar in 2017.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Patrick wrote the Breastplate”
It is dated to about three centuries after him
The prayer known as St Patrick's Breastplate, or the Deer's Cry, is an Old Irish lorica, a prayer of protection. Its language dates it to the early eighth century. It is preserved in the eleventh-century Liber Hymnorum, which also supplies the story that Patrick sang it as he walked into an ambush on the way to Tara and his party looked to the attackers like wild deer. It is very old, and it is Irish, but it is not one of the two texts Patrick is accepted as having written.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Drowning the shamrock goes back to Patrick”
A much later legend
The story is that Patrick scolded a mean innkeeper, telling her a demon was growing fat in her cellar on her dishonesty. When he came back and found her pouring whiskey to the brim, the demon withered and he decreed a drink on his feast day. Wikipedia calls it 'a much later legend'. The custom itself is real: a shamrock is put in the last drink of the day and either swallowed or thrown over the shoulder for luck.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
“Patrick fasted forty days on Croagh Patrick”
Told two centuries after him, about a mountain that was already holy
The story starts with Tírechán in the seventh century, who models it on Moses' forty days on Sinai. The demon birds and the serpent Corra are added later still. The mountain had been a sacred place long before any of this: prehistoric monuments around it are aligned on it, and the folklorist Máire MacNeill suggested that the pilgrimage began as a pagan Lughnasadh ritual.
Source: Wikipedia ↗
