The Truth Behind Saint Patrick’s Day Celebrations: Finally this hour, thousands of revelers are filling the streets and pubs in cities all over the world to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. We wanted to take a look at the man behind the myth, so we went to the Emerald Isle to learn more about the real Saint Patrick and his lasting influence on the world.
From Dublin to Donegal, people dressed in green will take to the streets for Saint Patrick’s Day parades – a proud Irish tradition. Or is it? The first Saint Patrick’s Day parade didn’t even happen in Ireland.
The Saint Patrick’s Day parade is an American invention, thought to have been born in Saint Augustine, Florida, more than 400 years ago before taking hold in Boston and New York. The parades wouldn’t come home to Ireland until a few decades ago.
“Ireland begins to adopt the US version of Saint Patrick’s Day parades, and you see that whole commercialism begin to spill out,” explained one historian.
Matter of fact, the parades are as Irish as Saint Patrick himself, who was born Maewyn Succat.
“He wasn’t Irish. He obviously came from somewhere in Britain at the end of the Roman Empire to Ireland as a slave when he was 16,” said the expert. “Then he would have been a missionary who came here in the fifth century, bringing the message of Christianity. He really traveled around mainly the northern part of Ireland.”
Even though I’m wearing green, Saint Patrick probably didn’t dress in green. If he dressed in any color, people think it might have been blue.
What about the famous story of Saint Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland? “Snakes were never in Ireland. It’s not warm enough here,” the historian revealed. That parable was written on this site in Ireland 400 years after his death.
But one thing Saint Patrick did do was help to end slavery in Ireland hundreds of years before other parts of the world, through the power of the letter.
“It was a letter to Roman soldiers: ‘You are supposed to be the enlightened one. Do you come from the empire which is the enlightenment? And yet what you’re doing is a barbaric act.’ That’s really the first anti-slavery document that we have in Ireland, certainly possibly the world, but certainly in Ireland.”
Source: raialkhalij + aljazeera