For many around the world, St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of green beer, fiddle music, and the best holiday after Halloween to wear a funny hat and throw up in the street.
For me, though, as a child growing up in the Northern Ireland town of Downpatrick, the saint’s traditional burial site, it was a pious event: mass in the morning, wearing an Aran wool sweater and a faded shamrock brooch, and then a day off from school.
After all, who was the real Saint Patrick, whose legacy encompasses so many facets?
In the 1,600 years that have passed since this Christian missionary and bishop made his mark on Ireland, the cult and mythology surrounding him have supplanted the man himself.
To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, here are some surprising facts you might not know about him.
He wasn’t Irish
Patrick was born into a Christian family in Britain at the end of the fourth century, when the Roman Empire was in decline and had become vulnerable to attacks from beyond its borders.
His comfortable life as a deacon’s son was cut short at age 16 when he was captured and enslaved by Irish invaders, spending the next few years as a shepherd on a remote and often icy hill.
Remarkably for the 5th century, he left two written accounts of his life, but “he’s not very good at specific details”, says historian Fin Dwyer host of The Irish History Podcast and Transatlantic: An Irish American History Podcast. “It mentions place names, but obviously they’ve changed.”
Some argue he was a slave on Slemish Mountain in County Antrim to the north, others say it was at Killala Bay in County Mayo to the west.
“These things are important to historians,” says Dwyer, “but no one will ever be able to prove it definitively.”
See dinosaurs and archaeological discoveries
He escaped slavery and then returned
In his early 20s, Patrick fled his captors and managed to return to his family in Britain, but soon felt a strong desire to return to Ireland and spread the Christian message.
“For some unknown reason, he decided to punish himself again and come back,” he says. Duane Fitzsimonstourist guide in Downpatrick, my hometown, on the Lecale peninsula. The region has many sites closely linked to the life of Saint Patrick and is home to the St. Patrick’s Centerthe world’s only permanent exhibition dedicated to Ireland’s patron saint.
We also discovered, at the end of our interview, that he is my second cousin, because sometimes the cliché that all Irish people know each other turns out to be true.
“He lands somewhere on the north coast of Lecale” and is discovered by Dichu, brother of one of the local kings, says Fitzsimons.
“It’s a curious situation, because they seem to have a lot of trust in Patrick, and at that time, these kings were the emblematic figures of society,” and they took a big risk in supporting him.
“If something went wrong in their societies, say, if crops failed for a year or if a sudden disease decimated livestock, their heads were the ultimate price for it,” he adds.
Patrick received a barn to serve as a shelter in the village of Saulnear Downpatrick. This location became the headquarters of its first church and still attracts pilgrims today.
He did not convert Ireland to Christianity alone
“It’s not a story of ‘one man arrives and converts an island that was divided into dozens of kingdoms.’ It would have been physically impossible,” says Dwyer.
Although Patrick was not the first Christian missionary to Ireland (that title went to Palladius in the early 5th century), he was the most successful.
The Dál Riata, in northeast Ireland, “were the chief royalty of Ireland”, and these were the leaders with whom Patrick associated, as well as spending decades preaching and carrying out missionary work throughout the country.
“I think the key to this is the idea of his slavery, where he would have learned our language and our customs and how to pass himself off as those in a higher position in society,” says Fitzsimons.
He also notes that he has seen an increasing number of erroneous claims on TikTok that Druids were massacred in the process of bringing Christianity to Ireland, but this is “complete nonsense.” Fitzsimons states: “If Patrick had arrived and caused people to die, there wouldn’t be a chance in hell that he would have survived, and there wouldn’t be a chance in hell that we would talk about him in the favorable way that we do today.”
He Wrote a Celebrity Autobiography
“He is the only person, at the time, in Ireland who we know of who left written records, and those records have survived in some form to this day,” says Dwyer.
Late in life, Patrick wrote a brief autobiography, “The Confession of Saint Patrick”, which served as a response to his detractors and defense of his mission in Ireland.
As an important figure in the church, “There are a lot of people criticizing him for certain things he’s done,” says Fitzsimons. “They question where his money comes from.”
For example, it was known that female converts presented the superstar preacher with gold, but he refused to keep the gifts.
“When they threw some of their ornaments at the altar, I threw them back,” he wrote. “They were hurt at me for doing that.”
He refused to suck nipples
In 2003, an Iron Age bog-preserved body, now known as Old Croghan Man, was discovered in County Offaly and is currently on display at the National Museum of Ireland.
The man, believed to have been a high-status individual, was killed in a ritual sacrifice, which included the removal of his nipples.
In pre-Christian Ireland, breast sucking was a way of demonstrating submission to a king, and historians believe that the removal of the Old Man of Croghan’s nipples is an indication that he had been stripped of his rights to the throne.
In his “Confessio,” Patrick provides further evidence of this practice in a story he tells of his initial escape from slavery. He found a boat sailing to Britain, but the captain refused to let him board.
Patrick retired to his quarters to pray. “That day I refused to breastfeed because of my reverence for God,” he wrote. “They were pagans, and I hoped they might come to faith in Jesus Christ. That’s how I managed to go with them, and we left immediately.”
He never expelled any snake
Ireland, as is well known, has no snakes, frogs or moles, as these animals never crossed the land bridge before Ireland separated from mainland Europe at the end of the last Ice Age.
As for how Patrick came to be associated with them, Fitzsimons explains that one theory is that when the Vikings arrived in Ireland in the late 8th century, they heard stories about that revered figure, Padraig (the Irish form of Patrick).
Padraig sounds similar to the Old Norse words “pad rekr”, meaning “frog expeller”, and as frogs and even snakes were absent from the country, it is possible that the two terms were confused.
And, of course, there is the simplest version: that serpents were a biblical symbol of evil, and Patrick eliminated this idea with the introduction of Christianity.
The association with serpents was first recorded in written documents in the 12th century, when a monk named Jocelyn of Barrow-in-Furness was entrusted with this task by the Norman knight John De Courcy.
The work of recording the legends may have taken place at Inch Abbey, a Cistercian monastery on the outskirts of Downpatrick which, incidentally, was one of the filming locations for “Game of Thrones”.
And, by yet another coincidence, Conleth Hill, the actor who plays Varys on “Game of Thrones,” is both Fitzsimons’ and my cousin. When you’re Irish, it’s a really small world.
His remains were lost for a time, and then were reunited in a star-studded tomb, with three of them in one.
If there was one thing people loved in the Middle Ages, it was sacred bones.
It is not known exactly when Patrick died, but the traditional date of his death is March 17, 461 AD, and the cult around him, and his eventual veneration as a saint, gained strength in the following centuries.
When Ireland was struck by Viking raids in the late 8th century, the supposed remains of Patrick, and later Christian saints Brigid and Colmcille, were sent north to Dál Riata for protection.
They were so well hidden by a local abbot that they ended up disappearing. That was until they were conveniently rediscovered by John De Courcy in the 12th century, who had them reinterred in Down Cathedral, Downpatrick.
There still stands the tomb of Ireland’s three patron saints, beneath a granite slab added in the early 20th century to prevent pilgrims from stealing land from the site.
Dwyer says he wouldn’t bet on the authenticity of the sacred bones: “It’s important to remember that we live in a time when everyone wants relics of saints, from Jerusalem to Dublin.”
As a woman of the Downpatrick tribe, however, I say that sometimes collective belief is what matters.
From mountains to monasteries and holy springs, there’s a little bit of Saint Patrick across Ireland
In 2023, Downpatrick and its surrounding area were recognized by UNESCO as the Morne Gullion Strangford Geopark.
The magnificent Morne Mountains are the park’s centerpiece, but according to Fitzsimons, geoparks “are not just geology, they are people, the landscape, their heritage and the way they celebrate that heritage. So St Patrick’s Day is a key part of that.”
St. Patrick’s Waya new 132-kilometre (82-mile) Camino de Santiago-style walking trail linking Downpatrick to County Armagh westwards, is part of this growing celebration of this history.
While the north of Ireland has “more landmarks” related to St. Patrick, says Dwyer, there are sites across the island associated with the saint, from modest holy wells to the majestic Croagh Patrick, a “sacred mountain” in County Mayo.
“It has always reflected the ever-changing Irish identity, in terms of how we relate to it,” says Dwyer. “He is, in many ways, an avatar of what it means to be Irish, and that is constantly changing.”
