St Patrick's Day

Much to our distress St Patrick’s Day was cancelled this year. By ourselves, out of precaution and sensible adherence to social isolation principles. It’s a great shame, and we are devastated. When St Patrick’s Day and its celebration gets mentioned sometimes, people often remark how stupid and out of character it is for us to go and celebrate something that is a symbol of christianity, of the extinction of native culture and of its replacement with a foul Middle Eastern death-cult that vilifies and devalues life on this beautiful earth while peddling pie in the sky, worldy power abuse and pedophilia.

And well may they ask. These are good points and fair questions.

St Patrick didn’t first bring chrisitianity to Ireland, it was already there, in small amounts, brought over, presumably, by random people from christian Roman Britain coming over for trade or whatever. A bloke called Palladius is sometimes associated with providing some sort of promotion of the religion in Ireland. But St Patrick is most usually credited with the widespread establishment of christianity in Ireland because that’s how he talked himself up, and how his successors, sycophants and hagiophiles wrote him up. He certainly is on (christian) record as going to town against various native institutions and traditions, such as druidic practices and festivals.

St Patrick himself was a Briton, from British-speaking Britain. His original name is recorded as Sucat, which is an abbreviation of the Gallo-British Sucattos. This is a well attested Celtic name and can be analysed as Su- “good” + cato- “battle”, meaning “good-battle”, which stands for “good fighter, warrior, hero, champion” etc, which is a common Celtic name, widely attested in Gaul. He was allegedly taken prisoner by Irish raiders on the mainland, was brought to Ireland in captivity, and spent seven years there working as a slave herding swine. If only he had kept at that, he might ultimately well have found his true vocation without inflicting any damage upon the world. And, at the very least, it would have been a useful contribution to society.

Instead he escaped and made his way back to Britain by boat. (Well, how else. It would have been a long swim). It is very interesting and significant to note in this context that he secured his passage on that boat back across to the mainland by making himself available for gay sex to the captain and crew members, presumably because, being a penniless slave, the only way he could pay for his passage was by selling his arse. For reasons best known to the masters of secrecy of the catholic church, guardians of high moral ground and protectors of the impeachable reputations of child molesters around the planet, this story has long been kept from the eyes of the world and is to this day not widely known by the public at large, although it has long been a source of merriment and entertainment for Celtic scholars everywhere. Either way, he went to Gaul, received “training” in theology and miscellaneous christian bullshit, and went back to Ireland with a vengeance, presumably to get his own back on the blokes that offered him secure and permanent employment as a swineherding slave and many an hour of ecstatic sexual gratification at the hands of the crew of that ship, quite likely like many others before and after. You know what they say, once you go brown you keep going down.

St Patrick was thus associated with the introduction and wide-spread establishment of chrisitianity in a country not previously overly tainted with it, and as such was to a large degree responsible for the destruction of native tradition, culture and learning. His venture proved an early blueprint for the behaviour uniformly displayed in centuries to come by hundreds of generations of rabid zealous missionaries, spreading out over the face of the earth like a plague, destroying native culture, tradition and language, dispossessing people, stealing their land, property and women, and distributing syphilis and gonorrhea everywhere they went.

So, you ask, what’s so worth celebrating about that.

And the answer is of course that there’s nothing to celebrate about that, on the contrary.

But when we celebrate St Patrick’s Day, we don’t celebrate that arsehole that went around converting people, locking women up in convents and stealing land and property.

Instead we celebrate Irish culture. We celebrate all the fantastic things that have survived and thrived over the centuries, against all odds and in the face of overwhelming opposition. We celebrate Irish music, dance, custom, beer and language.

And, importantly, by extension we celebrate Celtic culture in general. The culture of the people who were crushed by mainstream power and politics, pushed into corners and squeezed off their land and cheated out of their birthright and their inheritance throughout long centuries. Starved and abused and tortured and outlawed by imperial powers, only to still be here after all, two thousand years later. That is what we celebrate on St Patrick’s Day. In the words of a famous Welsh song: Ry’n ni yma o hyd - we are still here.

And, in a profoundly satisfying twist of natural justice, it looks like the cause of the cancellation of St Patrick’s Day may also well lead to the cancellation of that most obnoxious of christian feasts: Easter. A sick and twisted glorification of perverse life-denying and self-flagellating sado-masochism if there ever was one. If all large scale gatherings are off because of the virus pandemic, than surely Easter will have to be cancelled.

Now that I will enjoy. Bring it on.

I’ll be overhere drinking Guiness, listening to the Pogues and dancing a jig.