Saint Patrick's Day

May we have a very Happy March 17th., St. Patrick's Day.

Celebrating ,  thinking what kind of Ireland Patrick helped to create,  wondering what  kind of Ireland he came into in the first place.

We can manage the celebrating  without much bother, to the sight of  marching - or dancing - feet and the sound of pipes.  What kind of Ireland Patrick left us with when he departed to his reward,  we will be  reminded of that if we  go to church.

Which leaves the question - maybe the most important question of all - what  kind of Ireland did Patrick come to when he was  dragged here unwillingly, having to  escape from us by his  adventurousness and probably a few safe houses along the east coast ?  Whatever he thought of us then, he  came back to Ireland because he believed   these Celtic people were too precious  not to believe in the One God he believed in.

The Ireland Patrick had been dragged into was a structured and naturally developed society. The Celts had been one of the most powerful  people in Europe, challenging Greek and Roman,  so powerful that Julius Caesar had to kill a million of them in an eight year campaign to get his troops to invading  distance of Britain - a campaign glorified until recently by educationalists who might have known better.  Patrick learned so much  about our people's laws, customs and history that he and his followers  collected the laws, listened to the oral histories of the people and wrote  down both - of course they put in Christian bits and removed some non-Christian bits but Irish laws, oral history and customs that had been  passed on through generations survived. The laws were more humane than, for example,  those of Hammurabi  that are reflected in the Mosaic laws and were concerned with everyday living from royalty to bee-keeping, from ill-doing to the care and maintenance of invalids.  The Celts put great value on remembering rather than writing, cultivating memory as enthusiastically in their day as we are de-skilling ourselves of it in ours. At Festival times they reminded each other of what their laws were, decided who was keeping them and who was not, who should be leaders  and what should be done  about  all of this.  It was a very sophisticated law system within which there were families recognised as skilled in law, medicine, spirituality.

Patrick left two letters  that give us a glance - an annoyingly slight glance - into his life experiences, making little of himself but proud of his converts, fiercely angry with  a wretched man called Coroticus  who captured and sold some of them, and Patrick himself paying money  for permission to cross  borders between one clan territory and another in his campaign of conversion. In one of the letters he called us a barbarian race, although  we had laws and customs and social organisation that influenced every part of our lives. His trouble was that he  had been  brought up in a culture obsessed with the idea that there  must be  a perfect man, woman and  society and your governors   knew what shape these all were , so  everyone had better be pushed into that mould or perish. The Irish system and belief, though, arose up from the land  and the people on it, morality was based upon what nature and neighbours need, or need to avoid,  more concerned with restoring the dignity of a person offended than  with punishing the offender.

Patrick  respected  the Irish landscape too, so  he and his followers gradually nudged their way past the Druids - the ancient intellectuals in Celtic Europe  and Ireland - and treated our mountains and  wells and growing things as sacred, just as the Druids had done. Our reverence for the mountains and the wells and the healing  herbs still has a pleasant  mingling of Christian and Druid in it.

But all was not sacred, all was not a gentle passing of the religious , spiritual baton from Druid to Priest in ancient Ireland. There were conflicts before and after, but  less religious bloodletting than we might expect.  Ireland had its internal and external battles before  and  after Patrick. Because the people  relied more on memory than writing, what happened in Ireland was recorded by people in their remembered stories  passed down  generation by generation, stories of their history, real and imagined but always with truth embedded in it. Patrick's  followers in years after him wrote down the laws  with their exact directions for communal life and the folk stories with their particular and precious form of truth. 

The folk memory of Irish battles long ago was  just as valid an echo  of  past realities in Ireland as Homer's stories or Biblical stories were for their generations.

For that thought one of the people we can thank is Sean Mc Mahon who among his many wonderful books wrote one  entitled  " Battles Fought on Irish Soil -  A Complete  Account" (Londubh Books, Dublin 2010). This book includes a short account of the pre-Christian, folk-remembered,  two battles  of Moytura  and the Battle at the Ford. Patrick, if he had an ear to hear, would have spent lonely times hearing these stories around someone's fireside just as the Greeks learned their old stories around theirs. Sean Mac Mahon writes : " The earliest orally preserved belief was in a series of magical invasions, with each indigenous people falling victim to or being enslaved by successive new -comers. This may indeed describe in folk memory the reality of the country's past. As such it is as tenable a lore as Homer's Iliad was of  Ionian battles long ago......".  Patrick would have experienced the value and the beauty , the dangers and the faults but in both he  saw what he believed his God would find  enriching and redeemable. And so, not because  he is a world renowned saint, but because he learned what the Irish race is about , he reverenced our past while he  tried to mould our future.

And by the way, when he said we were a barbarous race he was using that awful word because of the culture in which he was reared.  The Greeks and Romans - and many people whom they invaded - called people who  did not speak their language barbarians, no matter how civilised they were  - they said they could only talk bar-bar-bar.  Like some Agatha Christie characters  equipped only with English stepping  off a bus in Delhi hearing  what,  in their unknowing ,  sounds to them like a babble of voices,  bar-bar-bar, from people whose language is a  thousand years older than their own.

We think of Patrick not just because of  what we  became after him,  but  because it helps us understand  what we were before he  even  got here.

(Reminder note about some of the ancient Irish laws : Bees - when you start keeping bees you give four nearest neighbours pledges against their doing any harm. After three years without complaints the neighbours each get a swarm of bees and become  beekeepers themselves if they want to.

Invalids: If you injure someone he or she is to be tended at home but if after nine days is still not recovered you are liable for maintenance , lodging and medical expenses.

There are complications and variations in the laws, so  "A Guide To Early Irish Law"  by Fergus Kelly , first published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies  in 1988 and later reprinted, will help.)