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She’s our female patron saint yet St Patrick gets all the parades, but with her name coming back into favour maybe it’s time for St Brigid to shine, writes FIONA McCANN

The low-key reception St Brigid gets these days is perhaps down to her gender, as some suggest, or maybe the complicated mythology surrounding her origins – her stories are often conflated with those of a pagan goddess of poetry and healing, whose feast day she also inherited and after whom she was allegedly named. She was once, by most accounts, one of the most powerful women in the country, a formidable founder of abbeys and convents, and a woman of an unusually high profile in the male-dominated hierarchy of the early Christian church.