What You Don’t Know About St. Patrick’s Day

What You Don’t Know About St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day in America has experienced an intriguing evolution over the past century and a half. Ostensibly a saint’s day in the Roman Catholic Church – in Ireland, it’s treated more as the equivalent of our Thanksgiving – it has morphed from an expression of Irish-American immigrant pride complete with parades and performances to an almost generic holiday anybody can celebrate as long as they like green beer.

Due to that odd evolution, most Americans know little (and, to be fair, care less) about the holiday’s origins or even its namesake. To cite but one example, few St. Patrick’s Day revelers realize they are celebrating not the saint’s birthday but that of his death: March 17, 461 AD. While you rummage through your closet for the proper green attire and consider cooking corned beef and cabbage, here are a few overlooked facts that can make your St. Patrick’s Day more rewarding. Erin Go Bragh!

Ireland’s Patron Saint Was British: Much of what is known about St. Patrick is shot through with folklore and legend, but historians generally believe he was born in Britain near the end of the 4th century. At 16, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold as a slave to a Celtic priest in Northern Ireland before escaping back to Britain six years later. He later returned to Ireland to serve as a Christian missionary. By the way, his real name was Maewyn Succat until he changed it to Patrick when he became a bishop.Those Snakes? Just a Fish Story: Among the legends most associated with St. Patrick is that he stood atop a hillside and banished snakes from Ireland. Truth be told, the latest research indicates there were no snakes in Ireland to begin with. There are no signs of the reptiles in the country’s fossil record and water has surrounded Ireland since the last glacial period. Before that, the region was covered in ice and would have been too cold for snakes.

On the March: Records show that a St. Patrick’s Day parade was held on March 17, 1601, in a Spanish colony in what is now St. Augustine, Fla. More than a century later, homesick Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched in Boston in 1737 and in New York City on March 17. Enthusiasm for St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York City, Boston and other early American cities grew from there and took on a much larger importance with the arrival of massive waves of Irish immigrants.

‘Irish Need Not Apply’: While the nation has long embraced St. Patrick’s Day as a shorthand celebration of Irish culture, the first wave of immigrants to these shores was positively reviled. Beginning in 1845, a devastating potato blight caused widespread hunger throughout Ireland. While approximately 1 million perished, another 2 million abandoned their land in the world’s largest-single diaspora of the 19th century. More than 1 million came to the United States, where they were looked down upon as disease-ridden and unskilled and regularly denied work and basic human rights. The first ghettos in American history were built to house the Irish.
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