St Patrick might not have been so lucky in today’s unforgiving Ireland

WE MAY be celebrating him. We may be sending ministers overseas to help other nations celebrate him. But the reality is that today’s Ireland wouldn’t tolerate St Patrick.

Not for a minute would this nation tolerate him, let alone welcome him. At best we’d ignore him. At worse, we’d hospitalise him or imprison him.

We have, for example, a conviction that anyone who went through abusive times as a child is likely, at the drop of a provocation, to turn strange in their adult years. Removing a child from his home and family by force, transporting him across national boundaries and isolating him on the side of a hill herding sheep or pigs, or whatever it was Patrick herded, has to have been gruesome abuse of a child.