How St Patrick’s Day veered from party time to sobriety – and back again

Drinking, dancing and general cavorting were frowned upon by the new ruling class. The government and church were at one on this. The Intoxicating Liquor Act of 1927 was an early indicator of this approach and the Criminal Amendment Act of 1935 a very resolute follow up.

It was all part of what historian Diarmaid Ferriter has referred to as the “moral panic” that gripped a sanctimonious new Ireland. Free from the yoke of imperialism, perhaps, but eager to be tethered in other ways instead.

It did the unfortunate Stephen no favours to tell the judge that he had been feeling unwell and thought a refreshment might do him some good. The Western People reported that he was fined and his solicitous friends fared no better.

There were a generation of cases like that up and down the land before the law was eventually overturned and a more liberal Ireland began slowly asserting itself. A State-sponsored dry St Patrick may have endured for decades, but it was a cultural and social aberration that seems, from a distance of a half century, about as reasonable and enforceable as Prohibition in the United States.

Wherever tradition, myth and history meet there is ample evidence of a symbiotic relationship between the drop of the cratur and honouring the arrival of a Welsh slave-boy who brought Christianity to these shores in the fifth century.

Leabhar Ard Mhacha — or the Book of Armagh — was written by scholarly monks in Latin during the ninth century. It noted that all Irish monasteries and churches were to celebrate Patrick with three days and nights of feasting. Drink wasn’t mentioned specifically, but it was a given.

This tradition was gleefully handed down the generations. The folklorist Kevin Danaher describes the St Patrick’s Day of the 18th century: “In most parts of Ireland, the men repaired to the local tavern after church to drink the Pota Phádraig, or St Patrick’s pot. Seldom did the drinking stop at one pot.”

Stiofán Ó Cadhla, an ethnologist at UCC, claims that folklore indicates St Patrick himself liked to have a drink. “One of the narratives associated with him is about peaca an tomhais, or the sin of mismeasure. Patrick, according to the chroniclers at least, did not appreciate his tumbler being shy on heart-warming mead.”

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in the US, says St Patrick’s Day was unique because it conveniently sat right in the heart of Lent.

It allowed a dispensation from strict meat and alcohol abstinence while Christians everywhere else were on the dry. The original luck of the Irish.

It wasn’t until 1631 that Mother Church circled off March 17 as the patron saint’s assigned day and another century again before many of the public traditions became popular.

By the 1720s, the church found the celebrations “got kind of out of control,” according to Marion Casey, assistant professor of Irish Studies at New York University. A foretelling perhaps of the censorious tones of the Free State government exactly two centuries later.

The faithful were being reminded, as they would be in the 1920s, about the true religious significance of the saint’s day. But as religion and politics have been incompatible bedfellows on this island ever since the Reformation in the 16th century, St Patrick inevitably became bound up in Ireland’s favourite and most enduring national sport.

While the first New York City St Patrick’s parade took place as early as 1762, it wasn’t until 1798 — the year of a brutal rebellion at home — that the colour green became politically associated with the day and the saint, according to Casey. This neatly corresponded with the point in Irish history when a burgeoning Irish Catholic nationalist movement — only a few decades away from Emancipation — was beginning to flex its muscles.

Up until the 1798 Rebellion, the colour associated with St Patrick was blue, as it featured both in the royal court and on ancient Irish flags, while the saint was — and still is — represented by a red saltire on the Union flag.

This green St Patrick would become a significant trophy in the war of identity, ritual and symbol in the following centuries. By the 20th century, when a Gaelic cultural renaissance fell in step with physical force nationalism, the saint’s makeover was complete.

St Patrick now represented the earnest, patriotic face of Catholic Ireland, a man who had driven the snakes from the island (spoiler alert: he never did) in the same way as the heroes and martyrs of the revolution had sent the English packing. But this popular and simplistic thesis did not go unchallenged.

In 1932, when the country swept itself into a frenzy of excitement over the International Eucharistic Congress coming to Dublin, the spirit of St Patrick was duly invoked. The year also marked the 1,500th anniversary of the saint’s arrival in Ireland.

This led to a mighty spat, at an ecclesiastical and theological level at least, between the Catholic Cardinal Joseph MacRory and Anglican Archbishop John Gregg, both claimants to the seat of Armagh and, by extension, the legacy of the patron saint.

Dublin newspapers knew whose side they were on, with headlines such as “Protestant Claims Vain and Unfounded” and “Laughing Stock of the World”.

While one million attended the Eucharistic Congress Mass in the Phoenix Park on June 26, 1932, the Anglican Church would have to do with honouring St Patrick in Dublin’s Mansion House the following October.

Whether he would have approved or not, St Patrick was now a vital and visible symbol of the new ascendancy. Even in the decades leading up to independence in 1922, St Patrick was regularly commissioned to give his blessing to the march of this resurgent nation.

The first St Patrick’s Day parade in Ireland was held in Waterford on March 15, 1903, the year it became an official bank holiday.

It had been declared Irish Language Week by the Gaelic League and the procession of marching men comprised the mayor and members of the corporation, trade unions and bands. The Waterford News and Star boasted that the city was “one of the most Catholic in the country” and St Patrick was put right at the heart of it.

 In 1916, the Irish Volunteers held parades throughout Ireland. Dublin Castle recorded 38 St Patrick’s Day parades, involving 6,000 marchers, almost half of whom were said to be armed. Rebellion was only a month away.

A year later, an Irish officer serving in the Great War wrote home from France. He described his regiment marching in a town near their base on St Patrick’s Day and “the streets filled with people to watch the Irishmen parade in their green and white ribbons”.

A slightly different shade of green, but patriotic nonetheless.

While St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Ireland were muted during the revolutionary period, the day was often chosen for large political rallies. Wherever Irishmen and women gathered, it seemed the patron saint was invited to offer his blessing.

With the fledgling Free State only months old, great pride was taken in Dublin’s first St Patrick’s parade in 1923. The Freeman’s Journal reported: “A picture of the reality of the new Ireland was seen by every spectator who, in O’Connell Street about four o’clock, witnessed the march past of 1,000 men of the National Army, their bayonets flashing in the sunshine.”

The first official, State-sponsored St Patrick’s Day parade in the capital wasn’t until 1931, by which time — as Stephen Kirby had found to his cost in Westport three years earlier — the joy had been surgically removed, with the ban staying in place until 1960.

But in Ireland there has always been a way to get a drink.

Novelist and poet Nora Tynan O’Mahony wrote in the Cork Examiner in March, 1927: “Our paternal government has ordained that, as on Christmas Day and Good Friday, no person shall sell or be exposed to intoxicating liquors. But this does not prevent the sale to a lodger in a hotel, or for consumption of a meal.”

Canine lovers could also get an alcoholic beverage at the Royal Dublin Dog Show. They were invariably joined by an eclectic mix of writers, politicians and the chronically thirsty, often not owning a mutt of any breed between them.

Overall, though, St Patrick’s Day in the early decades of independence was, as popularly remembered, dull, earnest and solemn. Very much in step with hard and meagre times, rather than a welcome break from them.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Maeve Binchy remembered: “Dublin was the dullest place on earth to spend St Patrick’s Day.”

Maeve recalled how she and her family would watch with amazement as Irish people in other parts of the world indulged heavily in the festivities while the “homeland suffered through a day of thirst”.

Those days are long gone. St Patrick, who folklore tells us always liked the wee drop, wouldn’t be short of company in any Irish town or city on the day he is celebrated, whatever the year.

In fact, it long ago got out of hand.

In 2005 there were 714 arrests nationwide on St Patrick’s Day, the vast majority drink-related. It was regarded as an unacceptable high, yet 400 were taken into custody by Dublin gardaí alone last year.

Stephen Kirby and his medicinal pint that day in 1928 were small beer indeed.

New York, 1762: The homesick Redcoats who marched during the first parade

The majority of emigrants from Ireland to North America in the 18th century were Protestant Ulster Scots.

The Catholic Irish made their way there too, though the mass emigration of the hungry and poor was still over half a century away.

Mostly at that stage they were made up of homesick expats and Irish military stationed in the colonies serving with the British Redcoats, fighting against American independence.

It was they who organised the first New York parade in 1762: the start of a tradition that shows no sign of waning.

They revelled in the freedom to speak Gaelic, sing native songs and play the bagpipes on the day.

The razzmatazz, colour, noise and scale of this year’s St Patrick’s Festival in Dublin is a much closer relative to what they have long enjoyed and cultivated in New York, Chicago or Boston than the earnest but staid tradition of the old country.

Ireland is richer now, more global, extrovert, inclusive and multicultural. The current parades are an expression of all those things, with excess thrown in.

Last year’s blow-out in the capital was worth in excess of €70m to the Irish economy, with an estimated 800,000 passing through Dublin Airport over a 12-day period. St Patrick is big business. He throws the biggest party in town.

But besides the green beer, leprechaun hats, tack and cultural cringe, St Patrick’s Day has a greater hold on the American imagination than it is often credited with.

Writing in Time magazine, Mike Cronin, a Boston academic and author of What It Means to be American, argues that in the US, St Patrick’s Day “is observed in a similar fashion to July 4 or Halloween.”

Less universal than the former, but hopefully less scary than the latter.

“It is,” Cronin concludes, “the closest thing in America to National Immigrant Day.”

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