St. Patrick's Day: the story behind the shamrocks, the green, and the general chaos

Every year on the 17th of March, something strange and wonderful happens. Cities that have no particular connection to Ireland dye their rivers green. Pubs everywhere fill up before noon. People who are, at most, one-eighth Irish on their mother's side suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to celebrate their heritage. Chicago turns its river a shade of emerald that would frankly alarm Patrick himself. New York stages a parade that draws two million people.

And somewhere in all of this, the green pints, the shamrock filters on phones, and the leprechaun hats that come out of boxes once a year, there's an actual story. A real person, a real history, and a celebration that started as something quite different to what it is today.

Who was St. Patrick, anyway?

One thing most people don't know is that Patrick wasn't Irish. He was almost certainly British, born somewhere in Roman Britain in the late 4th century, possibly Wales, possibly Scotland, and nobody is entirely sure. His real name was probably Maewyn Succat. Patrick was the name he took later.

At sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken to Ireland as a slave, where he spent six years working as a shepherd. He later wrote that it was during this time, isolated, cold, and frightened, that he found his faith. He prayed constantly. He felt, he said, that God was speaking to him in the hills.

Eventually he escaped, travelled back to Britain, and trained as a priest. Then, in a move that would confuse most people in his position, he returned to Ireland. Not as a slave this time, but as a missionary. He spent the rest of his life there, travelling, preaching, and by most accounts being extraordinarily persistent. He died on the 17th of March, around 461 AD. The feast day is his death day, the day he, in the Christian tradition, entered heaven.

He became the patron saint of Ireland. And for the next fourteen centuries or so, St. Patrick's Day was a quietly religious feast day, a gentle break from Lent, a day for church and contemplation and a perhaps slightly larger dinner than usual.

It was the Irish diaspora, particularly in America, that turned it into the thing it is today.

Why the shamrock?

The story goes that Patrick used a three-leafed shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three things in one thing, to the Irish people he was converting. Whether this actually happened or whether it's a legend that grew up around him later, nobody can say for certain. But it stuck, and the shamrock has been associated with Ireland ever since.

It became a symbol of Irish identity long before it became a symbol of a party. In the 18th and 19th centuries, wearing a shamrock on the 17th of March was an act of quiet national pride, sometimes a defiant one, in a period when being openly Irish was not exactly encouraged.

Why green?

This one's more complicated than it looks. Ireland's national colour was actually blue for a very long time, St. Patrick's blue, a specific shade that still appears on the Irish presidential standard. You can see it on old flags, old maps, and old seals.

Green came from the shamrock, from the landscape, and from the Irish nationalist movement of the 18th century. The United Irishmen wore green. Rebel songs referenced the green. Eventually, green and Ireland became inseparable, and the association was strong enough to cross an ocean and take root in the Irish communities of Boston, New York, and Chicago, where it was amplified to the point where an entire river now gets dyed once a year.

The Chicago River dyeing started in 1962, by the way. A plumber's union official noticed that the dye they used to detect illegal sewage dumping turned the water green, and thought: actually, what if we just leaned into that. And so they did, and now sixteen tonnes of vegetable-based dye go into the river every year, turning it green for about five hours. It is exactly as surreal as it sounds, and it is entirely brilliant.

How it's celebrated in Ireland

For a long time, St. Patrick's Day in Ireland was far more subdued than the version being celebrated in New York. Until 1970, Irish law actually required pubs to close on the 17th of March. It was a holy day of obligation, and the focus was mass in the morning and family in the afternoon.

That changed, and the national holiday grew. Ireland now hosts a major festival in Dublin that draws crowds from around the world, with parades, street theatre, live music, and a genuine sense of festivity. Other Irish cities have their own parades too.

But away from the organised events, St. Patrick's Day in Ireland often has a warmth to it that the exported version sometimes lacks. It's a day for going home if you can, for seeing people you haven't seen in a while, and for calling the relatives you keep meaning to call. It's still, at heart, about people as much as it is about green things and a man who herded sheep in the rain fifteen hundred years ago.

The legend of driving out the snakes

One of the most famous stories about Patrick is that he drove all the snakes out of Ireland by banishing them into the sea after they attacked him during a forty-day fast on a hilltop.

Ireland does not, and as far as anyone can tell has never, had any native snake species. The last Ice Age saw to that. The island was simply too cold for snakes to survive, and by the time the climate warmed, the sea had already separated Ireland from Britain and the rest of Europe. There were no snakes to drive out.

The story isn't really about snakes. In early Christian writing, serpents were a symbol of evil and paganism. Driving out the snakes was a way of saying Patrick purged Ireland of its old religions and brought Christianity in their place. It's a metaphor in the clothing of a miracle, which is arguably more interesting than an actual snake situation would have been.

What to say on St. Patrick's Day

If you want to wish someone well in Irish (the language, also called Gaelic), "Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit" means "Happy St. Patrick's Day to you." It is pronounced nothing like it looks, which is quite standard for Irish.

"The luck of the Irish" is one of those phrases that sounds positive but has a complicated history. Some historians argue it was originally used sarcastically, implying that Irish success was down to luck rather than capability. Whether or not that's true, it's been reclaimed as a straightforward wish for good fortune, and that's how it's meant today, so go ahead and use it.

Sláinte, pronounced "slawn-cha," means health, and is used as a toast. It is handy to know if you find yourself at any event involving Irish people and something in a glass.

The parade tradition

The first St. Patrick's Day parade didn't happen in Ireland. It happened in New York, in 1762, when Irish soldiers serving in the British army marched through the streets of the city to the sound of Irish music, homesick and far from everything they knew.

From that march grew one of the largest annual parades in the world. The New York City parade now takes about five hours to pass any single point on Fifth Avenue. Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and dozens of other cities have their own major parades. The tradition eventually came back across the Atlantic, and Ireland adopted the parade as a fixture of the national celebration.

There's something quietly moving about that round trip, a tradition born of homesickness, carried across an ocean, grown enormous, and eventually returned home in a different shape entirely.

This year's date

St. Patrick's Day falls on the 17th of March. This year that's a Tuesday, which means the weekend before tends to be when most of the celebrations happen in practice. Not that this stops anyone celebrating on the actual day as well.

Whatever your connection to Ireland, whether you have deep roots there, a family member who claims distant ancestry, or simply a mild enthusiasm for green things and live music, it's a day that rewards a little curiosity. The man behind the shamrocks was a fascinating figure. The history behind the green and the parades is stranger and richer than the leprechaun hats suggest.

And if all else fails, sláinte is a fine thing to say to someone you like, on any day at all.

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