It’s that time of year again, when Dublin turns into an open-air drunken fistfight and the Liffey’s banks are swelled with gallons of green vomit, freshly emitted from the ballad-singing mouths of American tourists all looking to celebrate the fact that St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland!
Here’s some little known facts about the man himself to fill you with pride while you enjoy your Guinness…
He Single-Handedly Brought Christianity To Ireland
Before St. Paddy rocked up to Ireland in year 471 or whatever, the Pagan Irish were just worshipping the Earth itself, drinking cans of Druid’s Cider, smoking turf and painting their faces blue.
Then good ol’ Paddy comes along and basically all by himself gets them praising Jesus, believing that three things are somehow one thing, and that if they don’t worship some invisible bloke in the sky then they’ll burn for all eternity.
Single-handedly popularising a genre is tough, it killed Kurt Cobain. St. Patrick basically brought grunge to Ireland. Think about it, before him the Irish didn’t even know that they were supposed to hate themselves for thinking about sex.
St. Patrick Banished The Snakes From Ireland
In the centuries of Pagan history before Patrick came to Ireland, the country had a massive snake problem, even worse than the heroin problem that the country’s got now, because the snakes all had Dublin accents and kept bothering the pagan lads for 50 cents for a hostel and a smoke.
Fortunately, Patrick came along and, using Christian magic and a bureaucratic flair for snake genocide, he managed to eradicate all the snakes leaving only a rare breed known as the hibernus politicus or the ‘Irish politician’, an especially virulent breed of which is the Healy-Rae which can be found in and around County Kerry.
He Was Kidnapped By Pirates
Most people these days who are kidnapped by pirates either end up getting thrown into the Gulf of Aden or ransomed by their families back home.
But not Patrick – he was sold into slavery and spent years toiling through Ireland before finally winning his freedom then returning to Ireland to enact revenge by converting them all into the well-balanced Catholics we have today.
He’s like Maximus and Captain Philips rolled into one Dark Age Bishop.
He Played Centre Forward For Glasgow Celtic
Not a lot of people who are familiar with the St. Patrick myth know that he actually spent six years on-loan at Glasgow Celtic where he set an early record for most Rangers fans deliberately hit in the face with a ball during an Old Firm game.
Following Patrick’s runaway success at the club, who used to play in purple and orange and featured a St. George’s Cross on their jersey, they changed their team colours to Patrick’s colours of green and white and switched their crest to a shamrock in response to the lucrative connection they were making with the early Irish Christians, who regularly travelled over to the games on Ryanair and drank loads of Guinness in the stadium pub.
He Held Ireland’s First All Day Raves On The Hill Of Tara
Besides being a farmer who became a slave, slave who became a missionary, missionary who defied a Druidic tradition, St. Patrick was also one of Ireland’s first international DJs, regularly playing day long sets in religious sites like Knock, Croagh Patrick, Vatican City and Ibiza.
In 489AD he played a 12-hour-long set on the Hill of Tara that Mixmag described as “a reason to convert to Christianity”.
