There was a huge response to our request for readers letters to St Patrick, and the message seems to be that, in modern Ireland, the snakes are back, as these edited extracts show
From Brigid to Patrick: The winning letter:
This letter from an aggrieved St Brigid (aka Angela Powerof Dublin) is the winner of our competition prize of €200 in National Book Tokens:
Dear Patrick – I hope you don’t mind that I dropped the “St” bit, but we do go back a long way after all. You are not a bad fellow, fairly good-looking, although where you managed to get that hat in the fifth century beats me – good connections, obviously.
Look, I don’t want to sound bitter but I have been wondering for a long time how you managed to get the main job. I was here before you and I managed a fair few spectacular events in my time, but no one seems to remember. You are patron saint, you get a massive parade and a four-day festival. Shamrock in the White House? Hello? I did that thing with the cloak which really set them talking and I was, after all, a goddess before Christianity became the in thing.
I know it is a bit of a cliche, but is it because I am a woman? Did they think I wouldn’t be able to hold my own with David and George and Andrew? They should have checked my record properly. I was well-qualified. Gender balance, my eye.
I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing at all, and you are not exactly top of my Facebook list, but I saw what happened to Joan Burton and it just brought back a few bad memories.
If you can tear yourself away from all the socialising, I’d love an answer. And by the way, my day, February 1st, is not a national holiday yet, just in case you wanted to know.
BRIGID.
Dear Patrick – Do you mind if I call you Patrick? Thanks, it is 2011 after all, and we are all very familiar nowadays. Maybe if you were on Twitter I could tweet this and say something like: “@stpat the snakes are back, can you come back pls? AWESOME!”
Well, the snakes areback.
I know you will find that distressing. They took all our money and built us houses that we queued up for overnight, in winter, in Ireland. We are now left with shoebox houses that shake when it’s windy and you can hear next door sneezing if you try hard enough.
So, like the Bible tells us not to, we worshipped false gods – not all of us, mind – and now we are owned by the Europeans and are embarrassed to take a ferry to Brittany because a woman in a supermarché might remind us of our debts.
BRIGID O'CONNOR.
Dear St Patrick – I wish that you had never arrived on our shores. I wish that the Christianity you introduced had not been manipulated to become so pervasive and abusive. I wish that we had retained Brehon Law. I wish that you had died on a sunny August 17th instead of in blustery March. I wish that your feast day had not been turned into 12 hours of drunken plastic paddywhackery.
KEITH NOLAN.
Dear St Patrick – It seems to me that you’re a man who knows a thing or two about forgiveness. The descendants of the Irish people whom you learned to love could do with some lessons on forgiveness today. We are so quick to blame and so slow to accept personal responsibility or move on towards a better future. We could learn a lot from you about forgiving the last government for its economic policies and the banks for lending us money we couldn’t afford to pay back. Some of us are so stuck in our unforgiveness that we can’t even contemplate welcoming the British monarch to our shores for an official visit, some 90 years after independence.
If you were back in Ireland today you would choose to forget the past and move on. You would talk not about the mistakes others have made, but about the need for each of us to accept responsibility for our own mistakes and to embrace God’s love and forgiveness.
LORRAINE ZIPSER.
Dear St Patrick– Any chance you might have a word with Himself and ask Him to pull off one of His strokes to get the IMF guys to lay off for a few years? If you can manage that and if you get Him in a good mood, you might also ask Him how we might turn around this economy of ours. A bit of divine intervention would really go down wonders in Kildare Street and it would greatly impress our European cousins that we know a thing or two about recovering from our sinful past.
I’m thinking, does Head-the-Ball grant you any special favours on your feast day? If so, give us a hand-out down here, we need it badly. And while I’m at it, any chance you might let me know the winner of the Gold Cup at Cheltenham on Friday? Regards, and best wishes to you on your big day.
SEÁN CADOGAN.
Dear St Patrick – I write to you in sadness to inform you of the state of your image. It is in the gutter. You are associated with worldwide drunkenness and profligacy. The recent demise of Ireland’s reputation has not helped. It is disastrous for your brand to be associated with the scumbags of Europe. The people who have represented you for 1,500 years, after a good start, have fallen down on the job.
As one of Europe’s leading image consultants and a fervent admirer of everything Patrician, I believe that I can help. What you need is rebranding. You must go green. With global warming and the destruction of wildlife and plants, the whole world is going green. This is a once-in-a-millennium opportunity for a great saint to reinvent himself. You could be the first celebrity saint of the third millennium!
You will have to change some of your behaviour. Stop standing on snakes – you must be seen to respect all forms of life. Stop burning your rubbish on hilltops and learn to recycle your waste. Holding up shamrocks is good, but don’t go on about the Trinity.
You won’t have to change your outfits. I love the beard. You will have to do a few eco-miracles before an audience. Change a few Nama estates into rainforests, or banish all bankers from Ireland. – Yours unctuously,
GERRY O'KEEFFE.
Dear St Patrick – According to legend you first visited our land in AD334; ever since, you’ve loomed large in our national myth. If you ask me, you have long outstayed your welcome. As a child I didn’t mind you too much: we got a day off school and were allowed to eat sweets for one day in Lent. But we also had to go to Mass on a weekday and spend the afternoon shivering on O’Connell Street watching an endless line of American marching bands.
But now I know the full horror of your legacy. You are the Trojan Horse who infested our land with Christianity. It’s because of you that we’ve been knocking seven shades of sugar out of each other for centuries. You brought us religious wars, sectarian hatred and priest brutality. You brought us John Charles McQuaid and Fr Brendan Smyth. You hijacked our schools, forcefeeding us the catechisms when we could have been learning something useful, such as foreign languages or economic management.
And your crowning glory is St Patrick’s Day itself, a national day of shame when Irish people celebrate with heavy drinking in the morning, vomiting in the afternoon and a scrap outside the boozer around teatime.
You are often portrayed holding a curved stick of some kind. Well, after 1,600 years, it’s high time to sling your hook.
DES MULLALLY.
Dear St Patrick – You need to come back soon. The editor of The Irish Timeshas just announced her intention to step down and you would be just the right person to take her place. Your experience tending flocks of sheep on the mountainside in the rain and the snow is the perfect preparation for the job. Your ability to hear voices and interpret their messages would be invaluable when you are writing editorials. Letters to the editor, of course, would only be accepted in Latin, thus providing new research material for scholars and postgraduate students. An Irishman's Diary would be renamed Confessio and a new supplement, Druids in the Dáil, would be added to the Saturday sports section.
Your skill in dealing with the schisms of the early Irish church would enable you to rid the paper of creeping split infinitives and dodgy punctuation. Your crook would banish stray snakes and annihilate mixed metaphors. Cliches would be eradicated and the wandering apostrophe would be tethered. Political correspondents would be promoted to agony columnists, and theatre and music critics would be granted diplomatic immunity. As readers turn their faces to the sun they would find shelter under your cloak. Oh Patrick, listen to the voice of Ireland! We are calling you to be the new editor of The Irish Timesand to lead our chieftains and our journalists into the new dawn. – Yours etc.
ITA BEAUSANG.
Ave Patricius – You don’t know me, but we have something in common, in that neither of us is from this island. That said, where you wanted the Irish to adopt something from the outside, the Romano-British Christianity you brought with you, I’d rather they took the opportunity to be more distinctively Irish. In saying this I don’t, of course, refer to embracing the dead letter of the Irish language, but to the adopting of a cultural tone that is more compassionate, more intellectual and, above all, less materialistic than in your/my former homeland. Dare I say, they might enjoy “frugal comfort”? (If you run into that Long Fellow, thank him for the telling phrase, if for nothing else.)
The determination to be more British than the British themselves was never more evident than in the period known as the Celtic Tiger years. This was when the Irish allowed the nouveau riche, monster-truck SUVs and all, to dictate the cultural tone. Ireland, as I’m sure you observed in your day, is frequently wasted on the Irish.
DAVID LIMOND.
Dear St Patrick – You did not make us Irish, but you did make us literate as well as Christian. The ancestors of your Irish slavemasters had the ogham alphabet. Like early computer codes it was suitable for conveying essential information but it couldn’t convey the visual and verbal artistry of script. We have recently (what’s a couple of centuries?) taken on the mongrel mixture of languages known internationally as English.
The Christian religion was a comfortable veneer over our old beliefs and traditions: church feasts coincide with cardinal points of the year, while saints’ names have been given to the old holy wells. We have done the same with the modern language. Hiberno-English carries the Irish blás. Literary critics praise this skill in our famous writers. Language students bemoan the same trait in their everyday contacts, claiming that “Irish people have too many ways of saying everything”.
We consume newspapers and books at a greedy pace. Would the old scribes be shocked to see how paperbacks have replaced vellum manuscripts, or would they envy our easy access to the written word? You are often thanked for driving out the snakes; I thank you for letting in the bookworms.
ANNE BYRNE.
Dear St Patrick – They call you Paddy, you know, and the new Taoiseach calls us Paddy, so I suppose that makes us all the same.
Ever since I heard about the tsunami I keep looking at the waves near where I live in Kilbrittain in west Cork. I’m 16 and in transition year. I used to just check on the size of the surf because we go down in a gang when it’s good and hire some boards. Maybe you did some surfing yourself. But I’ll never again be annoyed when the waves are too small. It’s the same water that eventually finds its way around the world to the coast of Japan. I can’t think of much else at the moment
NIAMH MOLONEY.
Dear St Patrick – People are writing informing you of our present plight. Yes, things have changed since you were here. You previously escaped a difficult situation in Ireland and returned with renewed determination. With that in mind, here are a few tips you might find useful this time:
1) There has been a major change regarding travel by boat from Wales. Journey time is only a few hours, there is comfortable seating and a choice of food, drink and entertainment;
2) On arriving in Dublin there is now a choice of motorways . You will probably pick Tara first, so please have the €1.20 toll fee ready: this saves time and helps reduce road rage in other motorists. Watch out for exit seven and you’re there.
3) Next, Slane. Suggest going cross country here, avoiding Navan (gridlock, no parking).
4) At Slane Hill, on no account light a fire, not even of green waste. Complete no-no under current laws.
5) Leaving Slane, take M1 towards Armagh, where there are two churches dedicated to you. Hopefully this gives you a sense of belonging.
6) You converted all Irish people to Christianity. Which you use is your choice. Both are fine examples of places of worship.
7) With reference to number six I must point out that although you are patron of Ireland, you are now in Northern Ireland. I am using the 400-word restriction to dodge detailed explanations here.
8) So, Patrick, if you take on the task of putting us to rights again, and I hope you will, you need to find a place to stay. There are vacant properties dotted all over the country. No problem securing a place and in the process discovering why we are where we are.
9) I hope you are getting the picture and that people you meet on your travels will be willing to share their stories with you.
10) Hopefully, with our future in a holy trinity of Your Hands, Divine Intervention and a Great Miracle, all our problems can be solved. – Yours in faith,
OLIVIA LAWLESS.
Dear St Patrick – I bet you wish you’d stayed in Wales now. – Love,
IRELAND (ELIZABETH NUGENT).
Dear St Patrick – I am writing in connection with the collapsing wall at the rear of the newly erected church, built under your auspices, in Ardagh, Co Longford. Bricks have been cascading on to my back garden veranda for days, with one slab denting the top of my barbecue. Fortunately the item in question is an extremely well-made model. My wife and I are now unable to sit out on the veranda on a Sunday morning and read the papers.
This gaudy palace was badly planned and is in a state of collapse. I know that, given the current climate, you have committed yourself to national issues. I am aware that this was motivated by the morally diseased state in which you found the country when you involuntarily landed here. I am, at this level, instinctively willing to support you. I admired your zero-tolerance policy on snakes. You overlooked the objections of the nauseating bleeding-heart animal-rights lobby when carrying out this policy, as well as those of the sceptics in public administration.
The druids had a convoluted collection of deities and holy men. In the event of mislaying something, one didn’t know whether to deal with “Brian, the God of Lost Property” or “Brian Óg, God of Missing Items”. Your decision to substitute all that with one higher authority certainly simplified matters.
However, myself, my wife and my eight children, idealists all, have agreed that we will row in behind an alternative figure if the wall issue is not addressed. Druid O’Neill has been wandering around looking pallid, murmuring to himself, and cursing into his pints. He has told me he’ll get rid of the whole church if we back him. I know he’s suffered a turnaround in recent times, but a week is a long time in the world of religious proselytization. – Yours,
CONOR NEVILLE.
