Were Saint Patrick to come to Ireland today, he’d be nowhere near as welcome as the festivities in his name suggest. A Brit of the lowest social standing going around preaching to people about their sins is about as far removed from wealthy, secular Ireland as can be imagined.
And yet, this frankly odd figure to modern eyes has the potential to not just unite some of those most divided on this island, but to teach us truths now being forgotten.
Despite his fame, few of us know much about Patrick. Most people associate him with little more than drinking, parades and snakes.
Those who believe, as Martin Luther King did, that “the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” might question whether progressive Ireland can learn much from so far back in our history.
It’s true that so much of life today is immeasurably better than it was in the fifth century. We’re far more prosperous and long-lived than our ancient ancestors. Our society is kinder. Few men die in battle and few women die in childbirth. Religious and social tolerance is the default.
Yet progress is not a straight line. As we advance, we also regress. Patrick’s wisdom speaks to some of the greatest challenges facing modern Ireland — uncomfortably so, for some of those who will laud him today.
As a section of Irish society turns against refugees, the patron saint described himself as a refugee. Church of Ireland archbishops John McDowell and Michael Jackson wrote a few days ago of the “jarring and jagged contrasts” in modern Ireland.
“On the one hand,” they said, “we welcome strangers — and on the other hand, we set alight the accommodation that might have been their home.”
In his Confessio (which along with the Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus is all that we reliably know about Patrick’s background and beliefs), he described himself as “a simple country person, a refugee, and unlearned”. Yet — as with many of those who now come to Ireland, fleeing war — his upbringing was far nobler than his later status might imply.
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The son of a prosperous decurion (a sort of councillor) and grandson of a priest, Patrick was a Roman citizen. But his life was transformed when Irish raiders carried the teenager off as human bounty.
He later wrote: “Can it be out of the kindness of my heart that I carry out such a labour of mercy on a people who once captured me when they wrecked my father’s house and carried off his servants?”
But rather than anger for his oppressors, Patrick came to view them with compassion. After escaping captivity, he stood in Britain and in a vision heard the Irish begging him to “walk again among us”.
Yet after returning to the “barbarous tribes” as a missionary, he wasn’t universally popular.
“I speak out too, for love of my neighbours who are my only sons — for them I gave up my home country, my parents and even pushing my own life to the brink of death. If I have any worth, it is to live my life for God so as to teach these peoples; even though some of them still look down on me,” he wrote.
Patrick also had a keen sense of justice. In his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, he laments a “wicked deed, so horrible, so unutterable” in which his new converts “were cruelly cut down and killed by the swords of these same devilish men”. He deplores how they “gave away girls like prizes” — people he says who were “not yet women, but baptised”. Excommunicating those responsible, he pours out righteous anger.
Patrick spoke with a humility foreign to our world of social media attention-seeking. Writing in his old age, he described himself thus: “I am the sinner Patrick. I am the most unsophisticated of people, the least of Christians, and for many people I am the most contemptible.”
It’s not the sort of status update you see on Instagram or LinkedIn.
For someone whose love for people and belief in God transcended the boundaries of his time, it is tragic that Patrick has often been a figure used to divide the people of the part of the island where he lived and is believed to be buried.
Five years ago, Mary Lou McDonald marched on St Patrick’s Day behind a banner reading: “England get out of Ireland.” A few years earlier, there were pro-IRA chants at the St Patrick’s Day parade in Belfast. This sort of behaviour demonstrates rank ignorance of the saint these people supposedly revere.
If Britain had got out of Ireland 1,500 years ago, that would have meant Patrick getting out. Patrick, who spoke against those “blood-stained with the blood of innocent Christians” would hardly have been cheering on IRA atrocities.
It’s right that the injustices perpetuated by Britain on Ireland are understood. But we should also understand that hundreds of years earlier, people from this island were plundering Britain.
History is the enemy of the propagandist. The story of these islands involves mutual space for recrimination, but we are also entwined by history, regardless of where borders are drawn.
Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness at Stormont in 2007
As anti-British sentiment has been stoked by Brexit and the antics of people like Boris Johnson, it’s instructive to remember that the man who is now seen as quintessentially Irish was himself British. In both that, and the fact that as a pre-Reformation Christian he can be claimed by both branches of Christendom on this island, Patrick has unique potential to unify.
Long before Ian Paisley softened into the man who sat joking with Martin McGuinness, the DUP leader told the House of Commons that the British government should make St Patrick’s Day a public holiday. True, he did so in characteristic style, saying: “I refuse to hand Saint Patrick over to the Roman Catholic Church and the embrace of the Pope, or to the IRA and nationalists.”
But he was sincerely impressed by Patrick, returning again and again to speak publicly of him as “a figure to be honoured and remembered”.
In 2000, Paisley spoke in defence of Patrick, saying: “I, like all other right-thinking people in Ulster, regret the sectarian and political label that has been put on Saint Patrick” — while his colleague Sammy Wilson made it clear in the same debate that he wasn’t remotely Irish, and said no self-respecting Protestant would go to Belfast’s St Patrick’s Day parade.
Paisley’s phone rang during that debate, drawing chastisement from the Speaker. A contrite Paisley apologised as someone shouted that it might be a call from the saint — to which Paisley replied: “Saint Patrick has such a wonderful place in heaven that he would not return to a place like this.”
If he did return, there’s every reason to believe Patrick might not so much marvel at the progress of his adopted land, but mourn what has been lost — and feel as much an outsider now as he did then.
This article originally appeared in the Sunday Independent, which is published in the Republic of Ireland.
by LoveLaughLarne
3 comments
when does it stop?!
Fuck me, scraping the bottom of the barrel here, Sam.
St Patrick bucked your Ma.