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.