9 Surprising Facts About St. Patrick’s Day

Much of what is known about St. Patrick’s life has been interwoven with folklore and legend. Historians generally believe that St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was born in Britain—not Ireland—near the end of the fourth century. At age 16, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and sold as a slave to a Celtic priest in the area now known as Northern Ireland. After toiling for six years as a shepherd, he escaped back to Britain. He eventually returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary.

Despite his status as a patron saint, St. Patrick has never been canonized by the Catholic Church. This was primarily because such a process did not exist until long after his death in A.D. 461. It wasn’t until 993 that St. Ulrich of Augsburg became the first saint to be formally canonized, and it was not until the 12th century that the Catholic Church established an official canonization process overseen by the Pope. Even though St. Patrick is not formally canonized, many people consider him to hold saintly status.

Among the legends associated with St. Patrick is that he stood atop an Irish hillside and banished snakes from Ireland—prompting all serpents to slither away into the sea. Snakes, as a Biblical reference, generally connote evil. But, if the legend is to be taken literally, research suggests snakes never occupied the Emerald Isle in the first place. There are no signs of snakes in the country’s fossil record. And water has surrounded Ireland since the last glacial period. Before that, the region was covered in ice and would have been too cold for the reptiles.

The red-haired, green-clothed leprechaun is commonly associated with St. Patrick’s Day. The original Irish name for these figures of folklore is “lobaircin,” meaning “small-bodied fellow.” Belief in leprechauns likely stems from Celtic belief in fairies, tiny men and women who could use their magical powers to serve good or evil. In Celtic folktales, leprechauns were cranky souls, responsible for mending the shoes of the other fairies.

The shamrock, a three-leaf clover, has been associated with Ireland for centuries. It was called the “seamroy” by the Celts and was considered a sacred plant that symbolized the arrival of spring. According to legend, St. Patrick used the plant as a visual guide when explaining the Holy Trinity. By the 17th century, the shamrock had become a symbol of emerging Irish nationalism.

One of Ireland’s three patron saints, alongside St. Patrick and St. Columcille, St. Brigid (or Bridget) is the patron saint of Irish nuns, newborns, midwives, dairy maids and cattle. Believed to have been born in Ireland around A.D. 450, Brigid was the daughter of a pagan king and an enslaved woman. She grew up to serve the church by building a church in Kildare, which was the site of a former shrine to an eponymous Celtic goddess.

Said to have died in A.D. 524, Brigid’s memory was kept alive by the church, which canonized her as St. Brigid. In 2023, Ireland designated February 1 a permanent public holiday in Brigid’s honor.

Although people in Ireland had celebrated St. Patrick since the 1600s, the tradition of a St. Patrick’s Day parade began in America and actually predates the founding of the United States. Records show that a St. Patrick’s Day parade was held on March 17, 1601, in a Spanish colony in what is now St. Augustine, Florida. A year earlier, the colony’s Irish vicar Ricardo Artur had organized a parade and a St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

More than a century later, homesick Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched in Boston in 1737 and in New York City on March 17. Enthusiasm for the St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York City, Boston and other early American cities only grew from there. In 2020 and 2021, parades throughout the country, including in New York City and Boston, were canceled or postponed for the first time in decades due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. They returned in 2022.

Although Irish Americans are now proud to showcase their heritage, the Irish were not always celebrated by fellow Americans. Beginning in 1845, a devastating potato blight caused widespread hunger throughout Ireland. While approximately 1 million people died, another 2 million abandoned their land in the largest-single population movement of the 19th century. Most of the exiles—nearly a quarter of the Irish nation—came to the shores of the United States. Once they arrived, the Irish refugees were looked down upon as disease-ridden, unskilled and a drain on welfare budgets.

The meal that became a St. Patrick’s Day staple across the country—corned beef and cabbage—was an American invention. Ham and cabbage were eaten in Ireland, but corned beef offered a cheaper substitute for impoverished immigrants. Irish Americans living in the slums of lower Manhattan in the late 19th century and early 20th purchased leftover corned beef from ships returning from the tea trade in China. The Irish would boil the beef three times—the last time with cabbage—to remove some of the brine.