Why we must shiver through national holiday

MANY countries were Christianised in the early centuries AD, but only the Irish have an autobiography by a man who claimed to be the very first missionary.

St Patrick’s Confession is justly famed as a unique historical text, describing how a citizen from the northernmost reaches of the Roman empire followed his personal vision and brought the new religion to an island on the very edge of the known world, an island where he had once been a lonely foreign slave.

Unfortunately, however, we have no further accounts of Christianity in Ireland for some 200 years and the efforts of later Irish annalists to fill the gap are so contradictory and confusing that TF O’Rahilly famously proposed his ‘Two Patricks’ theory in an effort to bring some sort of order to the problem.

The date of March 17 for the saint’s death only enters the historical record in martyrologies put together around the time of the first Viking invasions.

Sean Moncrieff (Irish Examiner, March 21) posed the question “why in the name of all that is sane and reasonable do we have a national holiday in the middle of winter?”

The answer is probably to do with the fact that, astronomically speaking, Paddy’s Day is the time of the spring equinox, when hours of daylight begin to overtake the long winter darkness.

As farmers and lawnmower-owners know, this, rather than St Brigid’s Day, is the beginning of the real growth in spring, when the earth begins to warm up, the grass sprouts and men’s minds turn to thoughts of fertility.

The early Irish church was well aware of the symbolism attached to Isaiah 9: 2-3: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.”

It was not for nothing that Tírechán, the seventh century bishop of Killala, wrote that St Patrick arrived on the east coast of Ireland “at sunrise, with the blessing of God, with the true sun of wondrous doctrine, enlightening the thick darkness of ignorance”.

It might give Brazilian ladies goosebumps where we have never seen goosebumps before, but March 17 is, to modify Enda Kenny’s unfortunate phrase, a date deeply embedded in our agricultural and Christian heritage.

Pity it had to be so bloody cold, though.

Dr Catherine Swift

Irish Studies Department

Mary Immaculate College

Limerick.