Is St. Patrick’s Day Celebrated in Ireland?

In the United States, St. Patrick’s Day has long been commemorated with rollicking festivities, but until recent decades, the holiday on March 17 was traditionally a more solemn occasion on the Emerald Isle where it originated.

St. Patrick’s Day has been celebrated in Ireland since roughly the 10th century when it was a religious observance first and foremost. Today, it’s a public holiday with parades and parties much like you’ll find stateside. Embracing some of the holiday’s Americanized traditions took quite a while, however. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-20th century that Ireland relaxed its drinking laws and began hosting more secular celebrations.

Here’s how St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland transformed from a religious occasion in honor of its patron saint into a multiday celebration of Irish cultural pride.

The namesake of the March celebration, St. Patrick was born into an aristocratic family in Roman Britain likely around the end of the fourth century A.D. As a teenager, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and taken to Ireland, where he was enslaved for a number of years. He eventually escaped the island, only to return later as a missionary and convert part of the population to Christianity. After his death—believed to be on March 17, 461, though the exact date is unknown—the beloved bishop became known as the patron saint of Ireland.

Around the 10th century, the Irish began participating an annual solemn day of prayer in St. Patrick’s honor on March 17. The religious holiday was solidified in the 17th century thanks to an Irish-born priest. Luke Wadding had become a respected theologian in Rome, where he established St. Isidore’s College and the Pontifical Irish College in the 1620s. The Irish Echo reports that, at the direction of the pope, Wadding compiled a comprehensive calendar of saints that led to March 17 becoming a holy day of obligation for Catholics in Ireland and beyond (perhaps beginning in 1631).

The feast of St. Patrick, which falls during the Christian season of Lent, then became a time for Irish Catholics to attend church in the morning and celebrate with a festive meal in the afternoon free from the Lenten fasting rules that prohibited eating meat. As this religious event continued on, Irish immigrants abroad began remaking St. Patrick’s Day into a cultural extravaganza.

Thanks to Irish immigrants in the United States and elsewhere, St. Patrick’s Day evolved from a religious holiday into a secular celebration of all things Irish. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade was held in present-day America in 1601, but the tradition took hold after Irishmen in the British military who were stationed in the 13 Colonies began staging parades in Boston and New York City between the 1730s and 1760s. During the 19th century, when Irish Catholic immigrants faced discrimination in Protestant-majority America, St. Patrick’s Day parades became an opportunity to show strength in numbers.

Today, with an estimated 32.4 million Americans claiming to be primarily or partially of Irish descent—making Irish ancestry the second-most commonly reported in the United States, after German—the wearing of the green on March 17 is still going strong. Australia and Canada are among other locales with long-standing St. Paddy’s Day celebrations.

Meanwhile, back in the old country, Ireland declared St. Patrick’s Day a public holiday in 1903. Even so, the emphasis on the holiday’s religious origins remained. With the backing of the Catholic Church, a 1927 law banned alcohol sales on several Christian holidays including St. Patrick’s Day. Yet, commercial pressure forced the Irish government to repeal the March 17 ban in 1960.

By the mid-1970s, the Irish were catching up to their counterparts across the pond when it came to revelry. Then in 1995, the government sponsored the first St. Patrick’s Festival in Dublin, in part to promote tourism and boost the economy. Ireland continues its support of the multiday celebration, which features a parade and a variety of performances and activities, today. The parade alone draws a crowd of more than half a million people. There are similar events in other areas of the country as well.