This piece by Terence J. Sheehy originally appeared in the 16 March 1973 issue of the Catholic Herald, and is lightly edited here for clarity. Images have been added. – Ed.
Douglas Brown says: “Ireland is the nearest far-away place,” thus giving an ideal line to a copy-writer to advertise one of our country’s main tourist attractions.
Ethel Mannin says of her cottage near Clifden, in her classic novel of the West of Ireland, Late Have I Loved Thee: “God is nearer than the door.
And St. Patrick, that most celebrated of all British visitors to our shores, felt himself almost visually self surrounded by Christ in Ireland, when he wrote in his famous hymn, “The Deer’s Cry”:
Christ be with me Christ within me.
Christ above me Christ ‘below me Christ on my right hand Christ on my left hand.
Christ in front of me Christ behind me Christ in the eye of every man who sees me Christ in the ear of every man who hears me.
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me Christ in the mouth of every man speaking to me.
Patrick, that West Briton of West Britons, was one of the first of our tourists, in A.D. 432, and he liked it so much that he stayed, and set up his Episcopal See in an obscure spot in an obscure kingdom, Armagh, and became the Apostle of the Irish Nation. He was buried at Downpatrick in A.D. 461.
You can see his bell, and bell shrine, in the National Museum in Dublin today. It was last used as a Mass hell and heard by a million people attending the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932, in Phoenix Park.
At Cashel, in Tipperary, you can see St. Patrick’s Cross, where he baptised Oengus, King of Munster. It is said that the National Apostle drove the point of his crozier through the royal convert’s foot in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. and Oengus took it all stoically, as part of the ceremony.
Many years later, over-eager Christians burnt down the Bishop’s church on the Rock of Cashel in the mistaken belief that the Bishop was still inside.
In Dublin, at the foot of the junction of Dawson Street and Nassau Street, at a side gate into Trinity College. there is the site of a holy well said to have been associated with St. Patrick.
There is no record of Patrick putting foot in County Kerry, and the friends, and indeed the critics. of the Kingdom, have advanced various theories as to how much this has had an effect on Kerrymen down through the ages.
Mayo men, however, had more than their share of the saint, and some say they probably needed it more, as he fasted the Lenten fast for 40 days and 40 nights on Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain, still the scene of an annual pilgrimage of 50,000 souls.
It is said that he wrestled with Christ for 40 days and 40 nights to win him over to compassion for the Irish people, particularly in granting the National Apostle the right to assist in judging the Irish people on the Last Day. This could indeed prove more than beneficial to the late-corners.
Let it be said that this exercise proved, beyond all possible shadow of doubt, that Patrick was British. Only a Briton would have such tenacity of purpose, such power of debate, such tact and diplomacy as to emerge victorious from the conference table with Himself.
Lough Derg, famous for its pilgrimage of St. Patrick’s Purgatory in medieval times still continues to this day as a centre of annual fast and penance.
For those who do not aspire to climbing mountains in Mayo, or taking short fasts and spiritual exercises for three days in the island of Lough Derg, there are the delights of visiting the Hill of Slane in County Meath. where St. Patrick struck the Paschal Fire,’ and the Hill of Tara, where he converted kings and chieftains and queens and princesses from their pagan ways.
On the way to Slane and Tara it is worth visiting the seaside resort of Skerries in north County Dublin, where the local people, so legend tells us, stole St. Patrick’s goat which he kept for milking, skinned it, and cooked it, and ate it thus earning for themselves the title of the “Skin-the-Goats” by their neighbours in Rush.
And if you do not believe this legend, take a boat out to St. Patrick’s Island off the coast of Skerries, where he dropped anchor to take an fresh water on his way up North, and you will see for yourself his footprint in the rocks there.
When one considers the times in which Patrick came to Ireland it should he recalled that he brought the tide “Mother of God” to the Irish language, and to the Irish people, so that they became steeped in a tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin.
St. Patrick himself taught such. a devotion, as in A.D. 432 the Christian world was still freshly rejoicing in the declaration of the Divine Maternity of Mary made at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431.
In fact, according to the late Senator Helena Concannon, there is an account in the Visions of the Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich in which she describes herself in one of her spirit journeys through the world being brought to Ireland and seeing the Blessed Virgin appearing to St. Patrick and telling him to take in hand the conversion of Ireland. He has had his hands full ever since.
In A.D. 432 of course, the common market between Ireland, Gaul and Britain was in full swing, with Irish sailors and traders and visitors and politicians crossing to and fro across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. It is therefore highly probable that the Papal Legates to Britain from Gaul, St. Germanus of Auxerre and St. Lupus of Troyes, put forward Patrick’s name to Pope Celestine as the man for all seasons in Ireland.
How right they were! And in A.D. 432 probably from the port of Bristol, St. Patrick set forth in a light craft for Wicklow, sailed up the east coast of Ireland. and his Mass bell was first heard in his church in Saul. Strangford Lough, and the first of the faithful beheld as Robert Farren wrote:
Christ of the supper room
Christ of the empty tomb
Christ of the Day of Doom
In this White Host.
Another Patrick, contemporary of Robert Farren’s, Patrick Kavanagh, the Thomist poet from Monaghan, echoed this thought in his epic poem “The Great Hunger”, in the line: In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.
For those of us’ who wander the Four Green Fields on holidays, there are, to enhance our vision, such lovely lines of Paddy Kavanah’s as these about his fellow farmers:
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
These men know God the Father in a tree:
The Holy Spirit in the rising sap,
And Christ will be in the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.
Speaking in Dublin some 12 years ago at a symposium on St. Patrick, Bishop Fulton Sheen observed that the shamrock symbol, by which he taught the people the mystery of the work of the Father, the sacrifice of the Son, and the fire of the Holy Spirit, had brought to the Irish people the great gift of joy, of good humour and the ability to get such fun out of life.
Terence J. Sheehy served the Irish Tourist Board’s general manager in Britain.
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