Gender equality among Irish saints!

There’s been a campaign afoot to make St Brigid’s Day, on February 1, a national holiday on a par with St Patrick’s Day. Gender balance among Irish saints!

And why not? St Brigid has a strong devotional tradition, and the St Brigid’s cross is a symbol cherished in so many Irish households.

Brigid, who died in about 523 in Kildare, also had a further reach across the seas, and even in wicked old Fleet Street in London the favoured church of far-from-pious scribes for matches and despatches was – and is – St Bride’s, Bride being a version of Brigid.

But it must be admitted that St Patrick has something of a head start in the celebrity of Irish saints. Brigid’s renown grew with oral knowledge and transmitted tradition – her beauty, spiritedness and spirituality, her community of women, her healing powers, her wells – and such traditions are often reliable. But Patrick’s life has been much better documented, and has attracted more continual scholarship – new biographies of Patrick appear quite regularly.

Diaspora

St Patrick’s Day was universalised by the Irish diaspora from the Famine period onwards, and its global reach is now terrific. (And yes, the Taoiseach should go to Washington on March 17 to present the shamrock – it would be surely unpatriotic not to!) Although Brigid always had her following – especially among Irish nuns on missions overseas, who recommended Brigid as a baptismal name for converts – it would be hard to match the star status of Patrick.

And I’m not sure if the feminist champions of St Brigid are wise to portray her in a more ‘diverse’ way – presenting her as black, for example. Or indeed, presenting her as pre-Christian and a pagan goddess.

This, as the marketing men say, is confusing the brand. If we want to promote Brigid, don’t muddy the waters by mixing her up with all kinds of different messages. Keep it simple. Modernise portraits of Brigid by all means, but show her as she has always been known: the Abbess of Kildare.

And teach more about the old Irish traditions around Brigid. Growing up in Dublin, I don’t think we learned that much about the practices around devotion to Brigid. I never knew that there was a tradition of leaving a scarf outside the door so that Brigid might pass and impart healing.

Grateful

I am now grateful to Padraig Belton who has written about a tradition practiced in Lifford, Co. Donegal around St Brigid’s Day. A child outside the threshold of the house says: “Gabhaigíarbhurnglúine: Osclaigíbhursúile: /AgusligigíisteachBrídBheannaithe”. (“Go on your knees, Open your eyes, And let Blessed Brigid enter.”) Then an older woman replies: “Se beatha; se beathanamnáuaisle.” (“She is welcome; welcome to the noble lady.)

What a lovely devotional practice, kept and cherished in so many parts of Ireland down the centuries.

An ill-fated meeting

Katharine O’Shea – disparagingly dubbed ‘Kitty O’Shea’ – died a hundred years ago, on February 5, 1921, as the widow of Charles Stewart Parnell. The magazine History Ireland has just conducted a discussion podcast on the theme: What if Katharine and Parnell had never met? The current Irish Ambassador to Washington, Dan Mulhall, had written a fascinating essay around this ‘alternative history’, imagining Parnell living into an age of Irish independence, and dying of the Spanish Flu in 1918 (rather than of pneumonia in 1891, four months after marrying the divorced Katharine – and the famous split in the Irish Parliamentary Party).

It’s a fascinating roundtable discourse, with Mr Mulhall, the scholar Patrick Maume, the Queen’s University Belfast academic Margaret O’Callaghan, and myself, chaired by Tommy Graham (available now on https://www.historyireland.com/hedge-schools/). Dan Mulhall notes that both Joyce and Yeats made the Parnell controversy central to their imaginative work. (Joyce’s famous scene in Portrait of the Artist begins with a woman calling Mrs O’Shea an ‘unmentionable’ name – probably ‘prostitute’.)

Blamed

The Catholic Church was blamed for the scandal which followed the O’Shea divorce, although initially Archbishop Croke kept his distance – Parnell and Katharine were Protestants. It was the fiery Methodist preacher, Hugh Price Hughes, who led a campaign in the Methodist Times against “immorality in high places” – backed by the crusading journalist W.T. Stead.

Divorce wasn’t admissible for political figures in Britain until well into the 1950s. Anthony Eden was the first prominent British politician (Prime Minister 1955-57) to have been divorced, and even so, the fact was kept discreet.

Still, the Parnell case remains a tragic story, and if he and Katharine hadn’t met, how different would Irish history have been?

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I was delighted to have my first Covid-19 vaccine last weekend: a jab of the Oxford Astra-Zeneca dose delivered with cheerful efficiency at Folkestone in Kent to promptly-moving lines of oldsters. Every jab helps the wider community develop immunity: truly a definition of ‘the common good’.