Greg Daly
Northern Protestants are embracing the debt they owe to Patrick, writes Greg Daly
There were no shortage of eyebrows raised this January when Belfast councillor Ruth Patterson told the BBC’s William Crawley that St Patrick was “a former Protestant”.
Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback show, Ms Patterson, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) until her November expulsion after objecting to a party colleague being co-opted ahead of her to fill a vacant Assembly seat, had challenged what she saw as sectarianism linked with St Patrick’s Day.
“We see hordes of marauding youths running around Belfast City Centre draped in Tricolours,” she said, continuing, “At the end of the day the Tricolour has nothing to do with St Patrick, St Patrick himself was a former Protestant.”
When Mr Crawley pointed out that St Patrick couldn’t have been a Protestant as he lived “a thousand years before Protestants existed”, Ms Patterson replied, “Yes, he may have but he was a Christian man in his beliefs. I see him as being a former Protestant.”
Ms Patterson had not been the first prominent unionist politician to have made such a claim. A year earlier, DUP minister Maurice Morrow made a similar claim on BBC Radio Foyle, saying: “It should be remembered that St Patrick was, in fact, a Protestant, and St Patrick is someone whom I have considerable regard and respect for, and I wouldn’t want him to be used then as some sort of a political football.”
Acknowledgement
Claims that Ireland’s patron saint was a Protestant over a millennium before the Reformation are, of course, bizarre, but nonetheless they point to a healthy acknowledgment by Northern Protestants that Ireland’s patron saint is part of their heritage.
Thursday, March 10 saw an especially exciting manifestation of this with the unveiling by DUP First Minister Arlene Foster of a large mural devoted to the saint on Tate’s Avenue in the Village area of South Belfast.
The mural came about, explains Angela Johnston from the Greater Village Regeneration Trust, after a local group had unsuccessfully applied for funding for St Patrick’s Day events, with the extent of local ignorance about the saint becoming clear in the process.
“I pulled together a presentation and did this in front of kids and families and extended families,” she says, “and the kids got to ask questions – the usual questions of ‘Is St Patrick a Catholic?’, ‘Is he Irish?’, ‘Does he always wear that big green coat?’, all those kind of questions.”
It dawned on her that while she had learned Irish history as well as British history in her integrated secondary school, many Protestant working class children had not had such opportunities. Supported by members of South Belfast Action for Community Transformation she and others felt it was time to “dispel all the myths and say St Patrick is for everybody”.
The Northern Ireland Housing Executive cohesion unit supplied funding for the project, though clearly sceptical about its wisdom, and they set out to put up a new mural in the Village, one that would communicate “the real story of St Patrick”.
When trying to explain St Patrick in working class Protestant communities, Ms Johnston had been amazed to discover that many did not realise how, despite the perennial flag protests, that the cross of St Patrick was part of the Union Jack.
“There’s a whole wider issue behind it all,” she says, “and that’s that educational attainment in Protestant working class communities, especially among young men is very low.” With many young people not even interested in going to school, she says, it’s hardly surprising that they lack a mature and informed sense of their history, their culture, and their identity.
The St Patrick mural is part of a broader ‘Reimaging’ campaign, where paramilitary murals are removed and replaced with images both more aesthetically pleasing and less violent as a way of breaking from the past. Unusually, though, “there was no paramilitary mural removed for St Patrick”, she says.
“We actually wanted this to be something that was seen by the most number of people that we could possibly get, so he’s being featured at the side of Tate’s Avenue bridge,” she continues, explaining that its location means that it should be seen by commuting traffic or people making their way to Windsor Park.
With the mural placed to maximise the number of people who will see it, its creator, painter and sculptor Ross Wilson, hopes that it really will help to dispel myths that the saint was somehow a cartoonish legendary figure.
“I’ve always been interested in Patrick, in his presence in Ireland and how he changed things in Ireland through the message that he brought and the effect that Ireland had on him initially when he was brought as a child slave,” he says, contrasting this with how he watched a parade when he went to speak at a St Patrick’s Day event in Carrickmacross.
“I can’t remember how many leprechauns I counted, and the ironic thing was I watched the whole parade but there was no St Patrick in the parade,” he says, observing that for many it seems that “the myth is more important than the fact”.
The saint’s real character powerfully comes across through his Confession, Mr Wilson says. “It’s him that’s speaking to you so there’s an identity put on to the personality of Patrick in a true sense, and not a manufactured sense, like a Walt Disney version or a green bishop – Patrick would have been a much more radical figure than that,” he says. Given how Patrick revealed himself through his writing, Mr Wilson says he thought it important to include a quotation from the Confession on the mural.
Evangelised
The saint would have had to have been quite tough to have evangelised for over 45 years in the wilds of 5th-Century Ireland, Mr Wilson argues, venturing that rather than the common depiction of him as a pristinely garbed 19th-Century bishop, he “would have been a rough, tough, and probably quite unkempt person”. In depicting him, he says, he took as a model a young actor he knew who looked roughly as he imagined Patrick as having looked as a young missionary.
That Patrick, with his capacity to inspire and unify Ireland’s Christians, has become in many ways simply an excuse for a party is “very sad”, he says. “It’s a bit like Christmas: your real gift isn’t under the tree. St Patrick’s Day isn’t just about going out and getting bluthered or drinking green beer.”
Ignorance about the saint is widespread, he said, speaking of a general lack of curiosity or willingness to explore. Commenting on how the saint, born and kidnapped from Roman Britain, had not even made the top 100 in the BBC’s 2002 ‘Greatest Briton’ poll, he laughs at the irony of “hundreds of thousands of Irishmen waking up the day after St Patrick’s Day with a hangover after celebrating the life of a Brit”.
Still, he has found that when Patrick’s real story is told, people are open to it. Patrick’s is “an amazing story”, he says, and when people experience this “new narrative”, it can be transformative.
“I see this as an educational thing,” he says.