When you think of Ireland, what comes to mind? Probably the color green, shamrocks leprechauns, Guinness, bagpipes? All of these things are commonly associated with Ireland because of one holiday - St. Patrick’s Day. But what if I told you that Saint Patrick’s official color was actually blue? That bagpipes are actually Scottish, not Irish and that, in Ireland, it was illegal to sell beer on St. Patrick’s day until 1961. What if I told you that Saint Patrick, the man himself, the patron saint of Ireland, was not even Irish nor a saint? And that the modern holiday of St. Patrick’s Day is much more an American invention than an Irish one? Let’s fix all that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Pretty stoked that this episode is randomly set to air on the actual day this time. That was pure luck. Luck of the Irish perhaps? I’ve noticed folks tend to like my holiday related episodes. So far I’ve covered Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and now Saint Patrick’s day and at this point I can’t even decide which one is the weirdest or the least understood. It’s really made me realize how much we love wholeheartedly celebrating, like really going all out, for holidays we know almost nothing about. Any excuse to party, we will take it. 

 

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Okay anyway, back to the show. St. Patrick’s Day as you probably correctly guessed is a holiday in honor of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Although, fun fact, he isn’t actually a saint. Yeah, Patrick was never officially canonized by the Catholic Church. This story is full of bombshells like that. Also, he wasn’t Irish. Patrick was Roman, technically, but he was born in what we would now call England in the late 300s. This was before the fall of the Roman Empire but pretty late in the game. At this point, the empire had spread all the way to the British Isles and included England, but not Ireland or Scotland. When he was born, Patrick probably had a different name. He seems to have acquired the name Patrick or, actually, the Latin version Patricius (Paa-tree-keyus) much later when he became a priest. He is thought to have been born with the name Maewyn Succat. His father was a Christian Deacon but that isn’t really what you think. His family wasn’t super religious. His father probably just pursued the position of Deacon because of tax incentives. So they aren’t like this super holy family or anything. 

 

When Maewyn but I’m going to call him Patrick to avoid confusion, when Patrick was 16 years old, he was kidnapped by some Irish folk who raided his family estate. So, remember, Ireland is not part of the Roman Empire but it is very close to Roman Britain. So there would have been some butting of heads here. Ireland probably felt this oppressive force that was the Roman Empire creeping ever closer. Ireland, at this time, is pagan, this is ancient celtic Ireland about which we don’t know very much because they didn’t have a written language. Everything was passed down word of mouth in their culture. So all written accounts are coming from Roman reports. So, you know, factor that in please. According to DoChara which calls itself the “Insider Guide to Ireland,” quote “The Celtic people of Ireland are said to have been a striking and colorful people, tall, fair and strong with brightly dyed and embroidered clothing, gold and silver jewelry and, in the case of the women, elaborately braided hair. There is a problem here though: the Celtic people of Ireland almost certainly didn’t exist as a homogenous race… and much of what we think we know about them was essentially created in the 19th century.” end quote. So that’s fun. But Ireland was different than Roman Britain in a few important ways. It was divided into many separate kingdoms, some of them quite small, and all ruled by different chieftains whereas the Roman Empire was an empire with one central, powerful, emperor. Also, Ireland was pagan, worshiping many deities while Rome, starting in the late 300s was relentlessly Christian. So, I’m getting like wild west vibes from 4th century Ireland and I don’t hate it. 

 

So Patrick gets kidnapped by the Irish, his wild west neighbors. They take him to Ireland where he is enslaved as a shepherd for 6 years. According to History.com there is some dispute about where exactly he was taken in Ireland. Some scholars believe it was Mount Slemish in County Antrim and others are certain it was County Mayo near Killala. Regardless, this is really crazy to me. To think that you could just be like chilling at home, as a 16 year old kid, just doing whatever the 4th century equivalent of playing Xbox was, and raiders just bust into your house and cart you off to Ireland for 6 years, make you raise their sheep. Wild. But this was not that uncommon at the time. It was just kind of part of life. It was just one of the risks of being alive at that time. So for Patrick, I mean it would have sucked, but also there was probably a good bit of just “eh, okay, this is my life now,” and he just sort of settles into living as an enslaved shepherd in Ireland. 

 

But, I mean he did get kidnapped and enslaved, so to cope with some of the grief he was inevitably feeling over that, he turns to religion and becomes a devout Christian during his captivity. According to Patrick’s own writings, God spoke to him in a dream at this point, telling him that he needed to leave Ireland. So he’s like “Okay, God told me to leave Ireland so I’ll leave Ireland now I guess” and he just walks to the coast and hops on a ship back to Britain. Which, like, if you could do that this whole time why wait 6 years? I don’t know. He was waiting for God to tell him to, I guess. But he makes his way back to Britain. There he has a second vision. This time it’s an angel who tells him that he has to go back to Ireland. Which, like, can you imagine? I feel like they’re just messing with him now. But the angel tells him he has to go back to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish people to Christianity. So before he does that, he starts studying to become a priest which takes 15 years. 

 

So he’s like, what? He was 16 then 6 years enslaved, now 15 years studying to become a priest so he’s like late 30s now. Pope Cellestine sends him back to Ireland with the mission of converting the Irish to Christianity, just like the angel said. So this is 432. But one year before this, in 431, the Pope sent some other guy named Palladius to do this same thing, convert the Irish to Christianity. So when Patrick arrives, a lot of Irish people had already converted. So the whole Saint Patrick was the one who introduced Christianity to Ireland thing is yet another unfounded myth. 

 

But Patrick was very successful in continuing this work in Ireland and he did become known for converting the Irish even if he didn’t start it. He did this by incorporating pre-existing Irish culture and religious rituals into the brand of Christianity he was teaching them. For example, he used bonfires to celebrate Easter since that was already a thing the Irish were doing and it was a familiar religious ritual to them. He just tweaked it and made it Christian. He also supposedly came up with the design of the celtic cross by putting a sun in the middle of a cross - a Christain symbol. He celticafied a cross, making it more familiar, less foreign to the Irish, and therefore more accepted. One legend says that he used Irish clovers, or shamrocks, to teach about the trinity - father, son, holy spirit - because they have 3 leaves. So, honestly, he’s a great teacher. Dude was a great teacher. He really thought about how to cater to the Irish so that they would understand and accept what he was teaching them. He was very good at differentiation. 

 

One thing Patrick did not do was banish the snakes from Ireland. That is, first of all, an impossible task for one man, second there were never any snakes in Ireland. They just aren’t native to that island. It’s like how there are no kangaroos in Mexico. You wouldn’t be like “Yeah you know San Jose banished all the kangaroos from Mexico, right?” It’s that absurd. But that likely came up in Irish folklore much later as a metaphor for the way Saint Patrick got rid of the celtic pagan religion which was viewed, of course, as evil and then you know the snake from the Adam and Eve story and snakes are evil and it’s all nonsense of course. But, even though he didn’t do that, he did do a lot of work to bring Christianity to Ireland and then he died, reportedly on March 17th, 461. 

 

People unofficially started honoring Saint Patrick on March 17th starting in the 9th or 10th century but it wasn’t made an official Catholic feast day until 1631. And I suspect ulterior motives for doing this because March 17th falls during Lent which is the 40 days leading up to Easter where Catholics are restricted from doing things like eating meat, dancing, having fun, etc. So throwing a feast day in there, Saint Patrick’s day, it was kind of like a cheat day where they got to party a little bit. They at least got to eat meat. They did not get to drink on Saint Patrick’s Day though. It was an official Catholic holy day, so pubs were closed on Saint Patrick's Day until 1961 actually. So it was not traditionally a drinking holiday in Ireland. Now, it’s probably one of the biggest drinking holidays, I would say, that and Mardi Gras, and maybe New Years Eve. It’s up there. But that is thanks to America. 

 

So let’s get into the Irish American part of the story because that’s where Saint Patrick’s Day really takes off. In last week’s episode about the Great Hunger, I talked a lot about Irish immigration to the US during the mid 19th century. But Irish people had been immigrating before that, not in quite the same numbers, but they were steadily trickling in. These earlier Irish immigrants were protestant though, not Catholic. Or, if they were Catholic, they at least pretended to be protestant or quickly converted to protestant because, as I said last week, there was a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment in the US, we’ll come back to that again. 

 

The earliest evidence of any sort of St. Patrick’s Day celebration in what is now the US comes from St. Augustine, Florida, actually, in 1600. It was a Spanish colony at that time. And, you know, the Spanish are very Catholic so it sort of makes sense that they would be celebrating a Catholic holiday. Also, there was apparently an Irish priest living there at that time. According to a History.com article by Christopher Klein, Historian Michael Francis was researching Spanish gunpowder expenditure logs from Saint Augustine and he noticed that gunfire or cannon blasts were noted as being used to honor Saint Patrick in 1600. So that’s probably the first time anyone in the Americas was like, hey let’s do a thing for St. Patrick’s Day. But, despite those records, Boston claims to be the first to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. On March 17, 1737, so like way later than the Saint Augustine thing, some Irish immigrants in Boston formed the Charitable Irish Society in honor or St. Patrick which was to help Irish people living in the city. It’s still a thing too which is cool. It’s the oldest Irish organization in North America. I do want to note that the guys who formed it were not Catholic. They were presbyterian. But I don’t know, they’re honoring a Catholic saint, perhaps they were closeted Catholics just trying to fit in. 

 

The first Saint Patrick’s Day parade supposedly took place in New York City in 1762 but it wasn’t at all like a modern day Saint Patrick’s Day parade. First of all no one was wearing green. It was actually a band of redcoats, like British soldiers. These were Irish born soldiers in the British army, because New York was still a British colony at this point, but not for much longer. These guys marched through lower Manhattan to a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at a local tavern. But this of course upset American born nativists who responded by erecting effigies of Irishmen wearing rags and necklaces made of potatoes, holding whiskey bottles. This was outlawed in 1803 but the stirrings of anti-Irish, anti-Catholicism are alive and well already in the mid 1700s and, if you listened to last week’s episode, you know how damaging these negative stereotypes about Irish people come to be during the potato blight and subsequent famine that started in 1845. 

 

So the first Saint Patrick’s Day parade was a bunch of redcoats so they were obviously wearing red and Saint Patrick’s official color was blue. Where does the green come in? That actually started with a rebellion in Ireland in 1798 against British oppression and conquest. A failed rebellion. But, they chose to wear green because British soldiers wore red and green is the opposite of red. So green came to be associated with Irish pride as, basically the anti-redcoat. Which, I never put that together. I just thought green was the color of Ireland cause there’s a lot of grass there. But no, it’s like an anti-British thing. 

 

So, let’s fast forward to the mid 1840s. For 7 years, beginning in 1845, Ireland is struggling and that is an understatement. There’s a blight that makes all the potatoes rot and most of Ireland is living almost entirely on potatoes, which, there are reasons for that and, once again if you skipped last week, maybe, I don’t know, maybe go back and listen and then come back to this one. I didn’t realize how interconnected they were but I don’t want to repeat a bunch of stuff you’ve already heard if you did listen last week. So terrible, terrible famine in Ireland which is now part of the UK. Britain is doing almost nothing to help. They just blame it all on the Irish who they perceive as lazy and they provide very little aid because of these stereotypes. This results in the deaths of one million Irish people and another two million leave the country, immigrating to Britain, Canada, and the United States by the shipload. 

 

These are not Presbyterian Irish immigrants leisurely trying to fit in with native born Americans. They are desperate, half starved, Catholic immigrants who pour into ports and then struggle to find work. They are traumatized and downtrodden, they face intense discrimination from Americans who feel they have no right entering the country, nevermind that they’re basically refugees. The nativist movement comes back full force, the “know nothings,” right, the ones who believe America should just be protestant native born Americans. And this is what I’ll never understand. Because these dudes, these white dudes that are part of the American party, the nativists, are also immigrants. I mean, they’re descendants of immigrants. They are not indigenous to these lands. Their ancestors did the exact same thing the Irish are now doing. And yet still, they also didn’t seem to understand why Native Americans would be upset about foreign immigrants with a different religion coming in and taking over. How incredibly hypocritical is this whole situation? And it goes even deeper. Because most of these guys fancied themselves descendants of protestant English immigrants, right like Mayflower stock. But it was the British, the Roman British but same thing, their ancestors, that brought Catholicism to Ireland to begin with. Forced it down the throats of the pagan Celts. And then Henry VIII and the split with the Catholic church and now they’re all “ew Catholicism is the worst you guys suck” and the Irish are like “but you’re the ones who made us be Catholic,” and just none of it makes any sense. Humans are so weird. 

 

So this anti-Irish, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement pushes this influx of Irish immigrants down, down, down into the lowest pits of society. I mean they are at the bottom. So, I mean, you’ve left your homeland, you’re isolated, everyone hates you, you’re trying to fit in with American society but also not lose the Irish part of you. Irish immigrants start clinging to Saint Patrick’s Day as a celebration of being Irish. It was something that brought Irish immigrants together and a way that they remembered and honored the culture and heritage they were forced to leave behind. It was also kind of a show of defiance against all the Irish haters almost in the same way that gay pride parades are. Right, loud and proud except green instead of rainbow. 

 

After the Civil War, Irish immigrants became much more accepted. Tens of thousands of Irish soldiers had served in the war and they had proved themselves worthy of being American, I guess. And after that, after everyone stopped hating them, they were able to gradually assimilate into American society, hold positions in government, enact political policies and whatnot that improved the lives of Irish Americans. Which, you know, it helps that they’re white. 200,000 African Americans also fought in the Civil War but their service didn’t do quite as much for their acceptance as American citizens or even human beings. They remained second class citizens for at least another century. Anyway, after the Irish became accepted as Americans after the Civil War, Saint Patrick’s day celebrations spread and grew. Even non-Irish Americans started celebrating by wearing green and joining the parades and merriment. Part of that was political. There were a bunch of Irish Americans now. They’re Catholic so they have tons of kids plus they were still pouring in from Ireland for decades after the famine ended. Politicians start to realize that they need the Irish vote if they want to get into office. They become a swing group, essentially. So these hopeful politicians start showing up at Saint Patrick’s Day parades and events and schmoozing with the Irish to try to get their collective vote. This is part of the reason why the holiday caught on with non-Irish, non-Catholic Americans. 

 

Corned beef and cabbage became the official meal of Saint Patrick’s Day, which, ew, but okay. This was also an American invention with a particularly disgusting origin. In Ireland, they ate ham and cabbage that was the traditional Irish version of this meal. But in the US, corned beef replaced the ham because it was much cheaper, and remember these are incredibly impoverished immigrants starting this US Saint Patrick’s day tradition. So they swapped the ham for corned beef. Corned beef was so cheap because of where it came from. There were a lot of Irish immigrants living in the slums of lower Manhattan. They just got off the ships and plopped down and were like, “cool, I’ll just eat out of this dumpster,” I mean not really but kind of. They would go down to the docks and buy the leftover provisions off of ships that were returning from the tea trade in China. They bought leftover salted beef off these ships for a penny a pound, took it home, and boiled it 3 times to try to get rid of the saltiness. They added cabbage during the last boil just to make it that much tastier and there you go - corned beef and cabbage was born. So this was trash meat, old leftover trash meat that had been on a ship for months. But that’s how desperate Irish immigrants were. And because it was mostly Irish people who were forced to resort to this, corned beef and cabbage became an Irish American dish and therefore got associated with Saint Patrick’s Day. 

 

In the 20th century Saint Patrick’s Day really took off as an excuse to party whether you were Irish or not. Lots of parties and parades and wearing green and drinking beer - that was thanks to a Budweiser marketing campaign, by the way, that’s why beer became associated with Saint Patrick’s day. We got got on that one. Chicago went as far as to dye its entire river green starting in 1962. City pollution control workers there used green dye to try to trace illegal sewage dumping in the river and realized “hey cool, it turns the river green. Let’s do this on Saint Patrick’s Day!” So each year they started dumping 100 pounds of green vegetable dye into the river which was enough to dye it green for a week. Today, they’ve dropped it to 40 pounds because of environmental concerns. So it’s only green for a few hours which is fine. I’m cool with no dye in the river but whatever. 

 

At this point though, Saint Patrick’s Day is still just a Catholic holy day over in Ireland. It is not a party holiday at all. They go to church and the pubs are closed. It’s that kind of day. It’s not until TVs become a thing that Irish people start seeing how Americans are celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day. They’re seeing it on TV and they’re like “Hey! That looks fun! Why aren’t we doing that? We’re more Irish than they are. What the heck?” So they decide they want in on the fun. They repeal the law that made the pubs have to close in 1961 and they start doing it up like the Americans. They use it as a way to draw tourism to Ireland, actually, with a multi-day Saint Patrick’s Day festival in Dublin starting in 1996 that draws millions of people to the city each year. So, you’re welcome for that Ireland. 

 

So there’s really only one thing left to talk about and that’s leprechauns. Because what the heck do they have to do with any of this? You know leprechauns, the little men in green top hats who hide pots of gold at the end of rainbows and leave footprints all over your elementary school classroom, those guys. The earliest mention of leprechauns comes from a medieval Irish text called “The Adventure of Fergus Son of Leti” which is about a mythical king of Ulster which is in Northern Ireland named Fergus. In this story, leprechauns are called lúchorpáin and they are described as small bodied water sprites who basically try to drown Fergus but fail. He grabs them by their necks and demands that they grant him 3 wishes. This mythical creature, the leprechaun, probably came from ancient Celtic belief in fairies who were like tiny people that had magical powers. Leprechauns became known as mischievous probably because of the whole trying to drown Fergus thing. They often employed trickery in an attempt to protect their treasure. So they’re basically like naughty deceptive fairies from ancient Celtic lore that got immortalized in “The Adventure of Fergus Son of Leti.” I’m not totally sure what they have to do with Saint Patrick’s Day though. Leprechauns actually have their own holiday on March 13th. I think they’re just sort of a symbol of Ireland in general and, as we know, Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations came to symbolize all things Irish. And it’s a party holiday so it’s pretty debaucherous like leprechauns themselves, those dirty tricksters, they fit right in.  

 

So the story of Saint Patrick’s Day really winds itself around in circles. It starts with Saint Patrick, who was British, bringing Catholicism to Ireland. Then it becomes a symbol of Irish pride for Irish immigrants defending themselves against British descendants, kin of Saint Patrick, who now hate Catholicism even though their ancestors are the ones who forced it on the Irish to begin with. And then, it starts to look like so much fun that even non Irish Americans, descendants of those who hated the Irish, can’t help but join in. And really, I think the moral of the story is we have got to stop hating things just because they’re different. Different does not automatically mean bad. It might even be good - like green beer good, okay. I’m not Irish or Catholic but I’m still going to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. I’m choosing to celebrate it as a day that represents the triumph of authenticity and acceptance. It was a day the downtrodden Irish immigrants showed their true colors and honored their Irish heritage, shoved it in the faces of the haters and the bullies and had so much fun doing it that the bullies couldn’t help but join them. Everyone wears green on Saint Patrick’s Day. For one day, we are all Irish. We are all one. That unity, that acceptance, was a long time coming. And for that, I will raise a glass today. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. And as I mentioned earlier, I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from History.com, Time Magazine, CUNY Academic Commons, Dochara, and Oxford Reference. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.