Damian Corless looks at some interesting facts surrounding our national holiday, and how we have celebrated it through the years.

 

Saint Patrick’s Day is that most international of national days, celebrated from Boston to Buenos Aires, Singapore to Seoul, Monaco to Melbourne. What those cities also tend to share each March 17th are the clement weather conditions perfect for throwing a street party.
In Ireland it’s different. There’s an old saying that March comes in like a lion, and the cruel Irish winter normally lurks in the long grass to give us a good mauling at the first glimpse of a skimpily dressed baton-twirling majorette.

But does St Patrick’s Day have to be on 17th March? Couldn’t we move it to some time more kindly?
That’s just what we did in 2001 – albeit reluctantly – when foot and mouth disease brought Ireland to a standstill. The March endurance event was abandoned and when the Dublin parade belatedly took place on a sun-kissed day late in May it drew the biggest turnout ever of some 1.2 million.

So in theory, St Patrick’s Day could be moved. After all, the Catholic Church moves the feast whenever it interrupts Easter Week.
In 1940, for instance, the Church observed it on April 3rd, and in 2008 on March 14th.
Legend has it that St. Patrick died on March 17th 461, but it’s really a case of ‘pick a number, any number’. It was given a slot on the calendar of saint’s days in the 1600s after lobbying by the Waterford-born missionary, Luke Wadding.

In practice, even if the Irish people expressed an overwhelming desire for it, St. Patrick’s Day cannot be moved because it’s become such a world fixture it’s no longer ours. By various happenstances of history, it became embedded wherever the Irish settled at a time when the world was less cosmopolitan.
Today, the next biggest ethnic blow-out in the United States, Columbus Day, is tethered to the second Monday of October, a long weekend causing minimal disruption. Uniquely, March 17th means a party no matter what day of the week it falls (bar Sunday in some places) and no matter what the disruption.
If we were to move it to suit us better here in Ireland, the many who envy and resent Ireland’s sweetheart deal with city authorities the world over would spare no effort in reeling St. Patrick back into the pack.

So we are stuck with the fact that we share March 17th with many parts where snow, rain and hail will never be a case for change. In some places, we share it in a most literal sense. March 17th is a public holiday on the Caribbean island of Monserrat because it commemorates a failed slave revolt in 1768, which, by coincidence ties in with the celebrations of the great many islanders of Irish stock.
In Boston, the feast doubles up with the original public holiday of Evacuation Day marking the withdrawal of British troops during the 1776 revolution. For millions from Chicago to Tampa it’s about dying the waterways green.

In Singapore some years ago I joined a huge St. Patrick’s Day throng to cheer six passing bands, all in Scots tartan, all belting out a non-Irish repertoire and saving their best moves for a stirring Flower Of Scotland.
St. Patrick’s Day has much in common with the institution that made it a holy day of obligation for Catholics, but only on 32,000 square miles of the earth.
Such ambiguity is typical of the legacy of Patrick, a man who might have been born in Wales or Scotland or elsewhere, and whose real name might have been Maewyn Succat.
That said, from our own bitter experience with the weather there is every chance that he might indeed have succumbed to a barrage of hailstones on March 17th, 461.
Here’s 17 things we do know, sort of, about St Patrick’s Day.

1 The Irish state’s first Saint Patrick’s Parade took place in Dublin in 1931. St. Augustine, in Florida, is on record to have staged the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade, in 1601. However, New York lays claim to the world’s first officially planned parade, in 1762, while Boston claims an inpromptu one for 1737, when a meeting of the new Charitable Irish Society spilled onto the streets and turned into a procession of rowdy paddywhackery.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own