How Many Patricks Is That?

Posted on Monday, Mar 14, 2022 1:30AMMonday, March 14, 2022 by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

*St Patrick with attributes – shamrock, crozier, Celtic cross, snake and blue cloak, not green.*

“God the Father. God the Son. God the Holy Ghost. How many gods is that? You, Quinn!”

“Three, Sir.”

“No, you heathen pup. There’s only one God. Come up here!”

In those bygone days of paganly sadistic Irish teachers, “come up here” meant that Quinn had fallen for what we called “the strap trap.” The teacher would deliberately choose a pupil who would fall for a trick question and then take pleasure in delivering three stinging whacks each to the unfortunate’s outstretched palms. Me, I blamed St. Patrick and his cute trick of raising a shamrock on high and telling the bemused heathens, “See, three leaves on one stem; that is the holy trinity of three persons in one true God.” His folksy logic had failed to travel down the millennia to penetrate Quinn’s admittedly thick 20th-century skull.

Thursday is St. Patrick’s Day. This is a day that for long divided those who were born and raised on Patrick’s green island from those who weren’t. Those who weren’t wore green hats, drank green beer beside green-dyed rivers and said things like “begorrah and the top of the morning to yourself” in foul American-Irish accents. They all had Irish grandmothers – the apparent outer limit of Celtic heritage. Once, during a three-month slice of my life in Orlando, Florida, I noted in a diary that 122 people had told me they had Irish grandmothers – that was an average of ten a week. It was embarrassing to be Irish in certain parts of America on St. Patrick’s Day. Read more »

Monday, March 17, 2014

Was St Patrick a Biocidal Lunatic? Some Sober Reflections on Ireland’s Patron Saint and Snakes

Posted on Monday, Mar 17, 2014 2:10AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Liam Heneghan

by Liam Heneghan

St Patrick

Like a Noah in reverse St Patrick kicked snakes off the rain-drenched ark of Ireland. So complete was his mystical sterilization of the land that seven hundred years later in his Topographia Hibernica (1187) Gerald of Wales could write: “There are neither snakes nor adders, toads nor scorpions nor dragons… It does appear wonderful that, when anything venomous is brought there from foreign lands, it never could exist in Ireland.” Indeed, even as late as the 1950s the Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote, “The belief that “venomous” animals – which term included toad, frogs, lizards, slow worms and harmless as well as poisonous snakes – did not and could not flourish in Ireland, owing to St Patrick’s ban, long held sway, and possibly is not yet extinct.” (Natural History of Ireland (1950))

Snakes, however, are not the only species that can be found in Britain or continental Europe while being entirely absent from Ireland. Moles, several species of bats, many bird species, including the Tawny Owl, several titmouse species, and woodpeckers, innumerable insects species, many plants, and so on, might be added to the roster of St Patrick bio-vandalism. Of course, biogeographers have long known that the impoverished nature of the Irish biota is attributable to a number of factors unrelated to St Patrick.

Firstly, Ireland is a relatively small island with an area of 84,421 km² compared to Great Britain which is almost three times the size (229,848 km²). The European land area is considerable larger still being over one hundred times that of Ireland’s (at 10.18 million km²). Now, one of ecology’s more robust laws posits a relationship between area and species diversity. The more land, the more species. A consideration of the relatively restricted latitudinal range of Ireland in comparison to Europe intuitively suggests why Ireland must have fewer species. For example, since Ireland does not have a considerable southern stretch it has no Mediterranean zone, though it does have an enigmatic “Lusitanian flora” found disjunctly in Ireland and in North Spain and Portugal. This includes a saxifrage commonly known as St Patrick's Cabbage, but, the component to Irish vegetation is rare indeed. Nor does Ireland have tundra habit, though, of course, it can be get chilly there at times.

Secondly, the present day biota of Ireland was assembled largely after the the glaciers of the Last Ice Age retreated. Although there may be some relicts of those formerly icy time, for example the Irish Arctic char, an apparently delicious trout-like fish, which is found in some Irish upland lakes, most Irish wildlife migrated there over the past several thousands of years.

An Ascetic Encounter: Oisín the bard and Saint Patrick at the source of the Dodder

Posted on Monday, May 2, 2011 12:30AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Liam Heneghan

By Liam Heneghan

For Oisín Heneghan, an exemplary contemporary Oisín.

The River Dodder, a significant stretch of water that arises at Kippure in the valley of Glenasmole, Co. Wicklow, travels twenty-six kilometers through the Dublin suburbs before joining its more significant cousin, the River Liffey, at Ringsend. Together these rivers, along with other lesser streams and brooks, move Dublin’s detritus out to sea. On its way, the Dodder passes through Templeogue Village, where I grew up, a town which the suburban expansion of Dublin caught up to and washed over in the 1950’s as the city surged in the opposite direction towards Tallaght, and on towards Wicklow, leaving behind alluvial deposits in the form of barely distinguishable estates of semi-detached houses banked up against the cottages, churches, and the forgotten antiquities of much earlier times. Some mornings queuing for a bus into the city center the sweet smell of pig-shite would catch in the throat, emanating from the little piggery down near the river, down where the village seems a little older, more primordial.

A seemingly benign and even-tempered river, the Dodder recouped some of its old boisterousness on the 25th of August 1986, when Hurricane Charley (called Charlie in Dublin) dumped several inches of rain into the catchment. It was the night of my younger brother Padraic’s twenty-first birthday and our family, along with many others from the village, stood close to the bridge over the Dodder that connected us to the rest of South Dublin, watching the water rise close to the roof of the new bridge. The Dodder has never been kind to its bridges. Whole trees were swept along that night. And over the years the river has carried many an unwary traveler to their watery end during such unexpected swells.

Those turbulent waters that we viewed that night traveled the same course as did the waters where, legend has it, St Patrick Christianized one of the last great Irish pagans, Oisín the bard.