What is it about St. Patrick that exalted him as Ireland’s patron saint out of the hundreds of known Irish saints (though only 3 have ever been canonised), and what does he have to do with the racist narrative that characterised all stages of the conquest of Ireland?

There are a plethora of Irish saints who left a vastly more impactful legacy than Patrick, many of whom even preceded him, and who carried Ireland into a golden age of scholarship, an unprecedented cultural bloom, and an extremely bespoke form of indigenous Irish Christianity that championed the transformation of one’s own life more than the converting of others’ into a prohibitive dogma. There already existed large communities of Christians in Ireland long before Patrick. He himself founded no monasteries, though later revisionism did credit him with the founding of Armagh; and his mission was all but forgotten for over 200 years, roughly the time between his death and his first biographies. It is these texts and their like, and not Patrick’s own testimony, which are used in schools to teach kids about him and which informs Patrick’s medieval cult as well as his depiction in  modern culture. And this is crucial, because the fabrication of Patrick as the ultimate champion of Irish Christianity in his medieval biographies was an attempt by a pro-Roman church in Ireland to claim supremacy over all others – an objective that led to the fabrication, in turn, of Paddy, that racist archetype of bruteness that’s been inflicted on the Irish people since the 12th century all the way to the modern era.

To answer this, we must first understand that before Rome claimed supremacy over ALL forms Christianity, it was never the homogeneous, all-encompassing one-size-fits-all teaching that it is made to be today. It began as a small sect that had broken off from Judaism, and wherever the teachings of this remarkably insightful Jew lad went, they took the local flavour of the culture that absorbed it. For a long while, several local and varied interpretations of the Christian message existed at the same time. Each interpretation developed their own understanding of the teachings, their own rituals, their own way of doing things and the degree to which they’d mix with the pre-Christian way of being. The Church in Jerusalem was different to the one in Alexandria, and the Roman church was just one more of these – only that it had the legacy and re-emerging power of the Roman Empire behind it.

It is also important to understand that Ireland didn’t become Christian by military conquest, religious martyrdom or evangelisation. Though there’s no reason to doubt Patrick’s own testimony when he claims to have converted people by the thousands, scholars believe that a deep groundwork was already in place, and that Christianity was brought into Ireland by the Irish people themselves, returning home after trips abroad and bringing with them this exciting, novel concept: that there was One god overseeing and responsible for all of creation, and his own son had been born human. It is hard to imagine what this could sound like for a polytheistic people, particularly at a time when the teaching itself didn’t come with prohibitions and institutionalism attached, but with the freedom to adapt this new idea to your old worldview and values.

Without any external pressure, the early Irish church was established by the Irish people themselves, with all the sovereignty and freedom they had to design it, and it rapidly took on its own bespoke shape and style – which from the moment of its inception was intrinsically and essentially different to the Roman one: instead of being an episcopal system where the Bishop called the shots, in Ireland the arrangement was monastic, where power lay with the Abbot. The practicalities of religious life itself were largely informed by the animistic, indigenous views of the people, which no one had beaten out of them through violence so they could still be fed into their thinking. It wasn’t some foreign set of values taking the place of a native world-view – rather it was the incorporation of a new set of values into the native world-view, creating a new, totally unique and indigenous expression of those values. This is why early Irish Christianity seems still so pagan, with their focus on hermitage, nature worship, sacred places, learning and freedom to create (as opposed to the harsh, petrified Roman form, full of ‘thou-shan’t’). Of course it wasn’t some sort of Christian utopia either, but in the Irish way, the focus was on imitating the life of Jesus. It was set on changing and improving oneself rather than others – a massive contrast with the later dominant Christian view of going out and converting everyone, by force if needed. This was the spiritual motivation for early Irish Christians to seek out hardship and challenging conditions, like leaving Ireland in an uncertain pilgrimage that probably wouldn’t lead them back home ever again, or eking out a living in the most remote and hostile places.

Moreover, early Irish Christianity never had a centralised focus of authority. Roman Christianity radiated into the countryside from within large and powerful cities. But in a rural society without urban centers, each monastery was independent from all the rest, and their style and approach traditionally reflected the attitudes of their founders (the first Abbot), not an external rule written in a book and approved by Rome. Eventually functioning like small city-estates, the Abbot’s title was usually hereditary, or kept within the same family, and in some monasteries the family line of the Abbots was directly descended from its founder. This, alongside seemingly innocuous things as the method used to calculate the date of Easter (which Irish Christians calculated based on the Moon), would become the main points of dissidence between the Irish and Roman churches, and that’s the whole keypoint here: there came a time when the Roman church set its intentions in making their form of Roman Christianity into THE one and only valid expression of Jesus’ teachings. As the Roman empire recovered its might and military prowess after its partial collapse, one of its main global imports became their own form of Christianity, which was to be standardised and uniformed in order to be enforced and applied everywhere in the Empire, disregarding localised expressions of the same teachings. Rome began a thorough and complex strategy of enforcing its own views onto all and any local forms of Christianity, and anything that didn’t follow in line had to go.

It should be a cause of pride for the Irish people that for over 700 years, their Irish Christianity was an increasing pain in the hole of the Roman Church, and it became the longest-standing independent Church in the world to remain so.

Patrick’s mission to Ireland happened in the 2nd half of the 400’s – a time when Rome was falling and had neither power nor interest (yet) in establishing a religious supremacy, as Christianity was still establishing itself there. But the following 200 years are a mystery – scholars just can’t understand how Christianity and literacy, let alone the Latin language, took such a quick hold in Ireland that by the early 600’s we’ve an Irishman like Columbanus writing letters to Rome in refined Latin, discussing complex matters of abstract theology. During this period of cultural sophistication, the figure that shone in Ireland was St. Columcille, and Patrick had been largely forgotten.

Columcille was a champion of the early Irish church. He founded a vast network of monasteries, and is regarded as a brilliant and wise scholar; and his legacy left a vast array of place-names, writings and folk-legends relating to him. Due to his life and many others like him, Irish Christianity became a major cultural force of the early Middle Ages. Mainland Europe began to receive a large influx of Irish monks that brought their own form of indigenous Christianity with them, and who founded monasteries wherever they went. Being true to their own spiritual tradition, they didn’t evangelise or attempt to convert others: they just set up camp, began doing their thing, and the right people decided to follow them, usually in large numbers. Rome hated them with a passion.

A point of nuance within all this is that the Irish church never necessarily sought to cut itself off from Rome either – Irish clerics often wrote extensive letters to Rome asking for clarity or advice in theological questions or canon matters. What they did want, however, and expressed so repeatedly, was to be left alone and free to practice their own indigenous expression of the teachings. Rome had never really been okay with this – as early as 530 it had begun enforcing the Rule of St. Benedict, a uniform formula for practicing a Roman form of monasticism that many Irish monasteries resisted for centuries.

But some Irish monasteries were indeed happy to adhere to the Roman style, calculating Easter the Roman way and elevating Latin, not Irish, as the language of scholarship. On top of that, different monasteries began to federate together, the most influential ones vying for the primacy of the Irish church, a role that was hard to pin-point as the island didn’t have a stable political centre either (the glories of Tara were long gone by this time). By the 7th century, the fight for ecclesiastical supremacy was being fought between Armagh, Kildare, Clonmacnoise and Cashel, a fight that usually went hand-in-hand with whatever was going on with the High-Kingship at the time. A big part of this fight was the production of literary material that highlighted the sainthood of their founders to bolster their claim. For example, Kildare produced in the 650’s the ‘Vita Sanctae Brigidae’, the first biography of the life of St. Brigid. Ireland’s rich hagiography genre was born.

Being unapologetically pro-Roman, and strongly contending to become the leader of the Irish Church, Armagh decided it also needed a charismatic founder to enhance its claims – and the character they decided on was Patrick, probably because it was an unclaimed figure with ties to both Ireland and Rome, but also because he was a half-forgotten historical person onto whom they could retroactively project any achievements they could think of. In the late 7th century, a bishop called Tirechán and a priest called Muirchú wrote Patrick’s first biographies, 200 years after his death. These writings are full of nonsense, depicting Patrick as some sort of deranged, crusading Christian warlock terrorising the countryside as he subdues the pagan Irish, depicted as unruly, wild savages. They also largely ignore the testimony of Patrick himself (that you can read here), which mentions no magical Christian superpowers, monastery founding… or snakes, which wouldn’t be associated with Patrick or Irish paganism until after a much later biography was written around the 1200’s by an English Cistercian monk, for an Anglo-Norman audience, to justify their conquest campaign. Patrick does show a certain level of contempt for Irish paganism, commenting on how fond they are of “idola et immunda” (idols and dirty things), but the people who he claims were giving him most grief were Kings, not Druids. By and large, he presents himself as a humble, clever, self-motivated missioner who understood deeply the society and the laws of the land was in. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to achieve all that he did.

By the end of the 7th century, the claim for Irish Church primacy was mainly disputed between the Armagh (pro-Roman, championing Patrick) and Iona (pro-Irish, championing Columcille) federations. Unfortunately for Ireland, the Vikings were soon to arrive a century later to shake it all up. The island of Iona was destroyed, and the Columban federation moved its headquarters to Kells, back in Ireland, which like Iona had been founded by Columcille about 300 years before. Over time, the Vikings began settling in Ireland and converting to Christianity themselves, BUT they did so under the Roman episcopal church, not the Irish monastic one. Bishops, not Abbots, held power in the Viking cities (the first cities in Ireland), and it was Rome, through its base in Canterbury, who appointed these bishops in Ireland. Through the subsequent 200 years, the power and individuality of the Irish church began to dwindle more and more, but the fight for ecclesiastical supremacy accelerated.

Ironically, it was the support of Brian Boru in the 11th century what eventually turned the tide in favour of Armagh being regarded as the supreme religious house in Ireland – ironic because he was technically fighting to stop Viking rule in Ireland and establish, possibly for the first time, a cohesive centre of unified Gaelic politics, which could’ve well used the support of a native tradition of 700 years of Irish Christianity. Instead, pro-Roman Armagh’s vying for ecclesiastical supremacy was quite in line with Brian’s political ambitions, making them natural allies able to validate each other’s claim to authority. From this time onwards, indigenous Irish Christianity was all but lost. All regards of Columcille as its father had vanished (the vacuum being filled by Patrick), and the ecclesiastical colonisation of Ireland was well on its way.

By the 12th century, the Papal power had Roman military back-up, and crucial changes were being enforced. The Gregorian Reform prohibited, among other things, the marriage of clergy, which was largely the norm in Ireland. But the figure that would turn the balance in Rome’s favour was an Irish cleric called Malachy, the pro-Roman Abbot of Armagh who had come into power breaking down several pillars of the Irish monastic tradition. He subjected himself to the Pope in person at a time when all Irish monasteries in Europe had become Benedictine (Roman monastic), while many in Ireland resisted still. Amongst a confusing transfer of power from Abbots to Bishops, he decreed that all Irish monasteries were henceforth to become Cistercian (a religious order which was all about strictly following the Benedictine rule). No wonder Malachy was the first Irish saint of the three to ever be canonized by Rome (the only other ‘official’ Irish saints are St. Laurence O’Toole, canonized in 1225; and St. Oliver Plunkett, canonized in 1975!).

Following Malachy, the Cistercian order arrived in Ireland in 1142 and founded Mellifont, becoming the first non native Irish religious community in Ireland. In 1152, a synod held in Kells had Canterbury claiming dominance over all Irish churches. This was rejected, but the Irish church became a ‘national’ church subject directly to the Pope, not to Canterbury. This all-Ireland church established the four archbishoprics that are still in place today, one for each of the four provinces: Armagh, Dublin, Cashel and Tuam.

By 1165, twelve more Cistercian Abbeys had been built, just 4 years before the arrival of the Norman military. And that’s the whole thing, though: the Cistercians were all French Normans. They were the ecclesiastical arm of the Norman Colonial power that was slowly planning, alongside Canterbury, to bring the rule of the Roman Church to the Irish, a ‘rude and ignorant people’.

The mainstream version tells that in 1171, when Henry II, the Norman King of England, arrived in Ireland for the first time and decreed himself its Lord, it was to get a hold on his vassals who had come and found riches, and prevent them from challenging him. But not many know that not long after the synod in Kells, in 1155, a meeting was held in Winchester where the resentful Canterbury clergy decided on a plan to bring the Irish church into the fold, once and for all, through an invasion. The following year, Pope Adrian (the one from England) gave a Papal Bull to Henry II bidding him “to reveal the truth of the Christian faith to peoples still untaught and barbarous, and to root out the weeds of vice from the Lord’s field.”, claiming also “That Ireland, and indeed all islands on which Christ, the sun of justice, has shed His rays, and which have received the teaching of the Christian faith, belong to the jurisdiction of blessed St. Peter and the holy Roman church is a fact beyond doubt” and, OBVIOUSLY, to ensure “without prejudice to the payment to St. Peter and the holy Roman church of an annual tax of one penny from every household”. A planned, demeaning narrative and campaign of racism accompanied this mission, a thread led by Pope Adrian and also Henry II’s own chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis: “A most filthy race … sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of the faith … They pay neither tithes nor first fruits; they do not contract marriage, nor shun incestuous connections”.

This seems to me the origin of the Irish inferiority complex, which Irish people are still healing from, developing out of centuries of blatantly false and negative depictions of the nature, education and capacities of the Irish nation. What is absolutely mind-blowing to me as an Irish history student is the fact that this narrative began in the 12th century, a time when Ireland was experiencing radical inner changes, yes, but also an absolutely stunning flourish of genius creativity, fueled by over 500 years of scholarly sophistication. This is the period that gave us the Book of Invasions and the Book of Leinster (which contains copies of the ‘Táin Bó Cúailnge’ and the earliest surviving version of the ‘Dindsenchas’). It is just so unbelievable that Henry and the Pope’s seeds of racist stigma took root so well at a time when the realities of Irish society couldn’t have been more different.

This was the hateful narrative that gave invaders a justification for their actions, and which was taken on and brought further by Normans, Elizabethians, Cromwellians and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy all the way to the 19th century and the “No Irish Need Apply” signs outside shops in Boston.

How did Patrick become Paddy? Because Rome’s imperial, economic and political interests traversed every aspect of the religion they claimed was theirs to shape, control and profit from. Because the Irish, ruthlessly themselves as they were, defied its authority for 700 years, staying truer than most to its native values, shining as a reminder that Christianity’s shape wasn’t absolute, and not in the hands of any mortal man to decide upon. Because the vengeful Anglo-Norman church in Canterbury decided to take by force what had never been theirs to begin with.

Patrick was just a puppet in the beginnings of a spiritual colonisation that was preparing the grounds for military occupation, and the subsequent 800 years of Paddy-slagging was the result.

Sources:

• Kevin Whelan, “Religion, landscape and settlement in Ireland“
• Roger Chatterton Newman, “Brian Boru King of Ireland”
• Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, “Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200”
• Edel Bhreathnach, “Ireland in the Medieval World AD 400-1000: Landscape, Kingship and Religion”
• Dara Molloy, “The Globalisation of God”