Next Wednesday is St. Patrick’s Day.
Now the average party-goer at Keneally’s or the Dubliner will probably, and rightfully, care more about what substance made their beer green, and not the history that informs this annual celebration of all things Irish.
Yet for a wee bit of insight to this holiday, and to perhaps give you the gift of gab without having to kiss the Blarney stone, here are some tidbits about St. Patrick’s Day, its history and heritage.
Going Green
My German heritage notwithstanding, I relish this annual opportunity to don green, put "The Unforgettable Fire" on repeat on my iPod and try out my best Irish brogue (to the consternation of those around me). I’m not the only one who looks forward to all the shamrocks and shenanigans, however.
Currently, there are more than 34 million Americans who trace their ancestry to the Emerald Isle, although last year Ireland Prime Minister Brian Cowen put the number at closer to 44 million. For perspective, that is about nine times more people than there are actually in Ireland today.
These Irish-Americans are the descendants of the five million or so immigrants who journeyed to the United States since 1820, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. One such descendant is none other than President Barack Obama who, according to a report from Politico last year, is “3.1 percent Irish.”
No, there was no O’Bama clan from County Cork. But Obama did apparently have a “great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney" who was “an Irish immigrant who came to America in 1850.” Kearney “hailed from Moneygall, County Offaly, a tiny Irish village about an hour and a half west of Dublin.”
Such news prompted “There’s No One as Irish as Barack Obama,” the song that took the Internet by storm in 2008. It also triggered a series of stories about Obama’s other Irish relatives. Ironically, it turns out that distant cousins of Obama also attempted to reform health care in the mid-19th century.
We’ll see how he compares to his family these next few weeks. With the Senate at loggerheads, it appears Obama will need more than the luck of the Irish to get health care passed by April.
Tradition of the Holiday
The first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in America dates back to sometime in the 18th century. There are a few reports that claim the first St. Patrick’s Day parade was held in Boston in the late 1730s. Other reports assert the first parade was when Irish soldiers in the British army marched in New York City in 1762. Despite those discrepancies, it’s a fixture on the calendar today. St. Patrick’s Day is not an official holiday, yet because so many people celebrate it each March 17, the day St. Patrick is believed to have died, the U.S. Congress mandated March as Irish-American Heritage Month in 1995.
St. Patrick and Those Snakes
For starters, those of you who turn out to imbibe next Wednesday can raise a glass to celebrate St. Patrick’s rather impressive record of converting the pagan Romanized Celts in Ireland in the fifth century. Pub-crawlers can likewise toast his other famous feat: Clearing an entire island of snakes.
If you are Irish, and you haven’t read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, you probably should. Cahill asserts it was Irish monks in the dark ages who saved Western civilization from being discarded by the barbarian hordes running amok. Without these monks, Cahill surmises, we wouldn’t have the Greek and Roman classics that inform much of the Western culture and tradition. Nicely done, Irish.
Cahill also provides an intriguing little biography of St. Patrick, or Patricius, as he was known at the time. Cahill writes that Patricius wasn’t Irish, but rather “a middle-class lad, a Romanized Briton looking forward to a classical education and career.” Marauding Irish enslavers abducted Patricius from Britain when he was 16, derailing his classical education and giving him a new career path — that of a shepherd.
Patricius was a slave for at least six years doing what shepherds do, freezing in the cold and bitter hills of Ireland. Cahill describes that during this time Patricius “did have two constant companions ... hunger and nakedness.” From this difficult experience, Patricius found solace in prayer and religion. Years later, he converted the island to Christianity.
He did not, however, drive out all the snakes.
As Samuel Jackson can testify, snakes are everywhere. Everywhere except a few places. The National Zoological Park, a part of the Smithsonian in D.C., notes that of all the places in the world, “Ireland, New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica” are without snakes. All the water that surrounds the island nation, not St. Patrick’s power, keep the snakes out of Ireland.
With the exception of a herpaterium, “There are no snakes in Ireland for the simple reason that they can't get there.” The National Zoo also documents this important fact: "So far, no serpent has successfully migrated across the open ocean to a new terrestrial home." Let’s hope that stays that way.
What St. Patrick did do was convert the druids and pagans who used the snake as a symbol in many of their worship ceremonies.
The San Patricios
Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants left Ireland in the 1840s to escape the horrific potato blight that ravaged the Irish countryside. Once arriving in America, however, conditions were quite deplorable. Discrimination against the Irish became commonplace throughout the country. Many suffered in poverty in squalid cities.
And other Irish immigrants were sent right off to fight in the Mexican war.
While the U.S-Mexican War ended with the acquisition of many of the states that comprise the western United States today, the war was not popular with all Americans at the time. Whig Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed it. Future Civil War general and then President Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in it, thought it was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” And author Henry David Thoreau hated it so much he refused to pay a Massachusetts poll tax funding the war.
This landed him in jail, where he was inspired to pen his famous work, Civil Disobedience. That, in turn, inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
A group of Irish immigrants known as the San Patricios also opposed it. Aghast at the horrors of the war and the brutal attacks on their fellow Catholics, this band of Irish soldiers abandoned the American cause and fought on the side of the Mexican forces. Their story is a fascinating, albeit relatively unknown one. Now it is set to the music of the Chieftains.
So as you go out next Wednesday, keep an eye on the slow discoloration of your teeth from that green beer, and keep in mind just some of the history that we can all celebrate each March 17.
One Irish descendant is none other than President Barack Obama who, according to a report from "Politico" last year, is “3.1 percent Irish.”
