Thoughts on St Patrick's Day (Part 2)

When I wrote in my last that St.Patrick 'would not have seen Ireland as a nation at all but as a peripheral wilderness inhabited by savage, lawless and godless men' I meant no offence to the Irish of today.

Strabo, the Greek geographer, was the first writer to refer to the Irish: he had heard that they were cannibals - the fabled anthropophagi.

Writing in the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales said that the Irish were so barbarous, that they could not be said to have any culture at all. 'Mankind' he says, 'usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and then from fields to settlements and towns... but the Irish have not progressed at all... They scorn to work the land, have little us for towns, and despise the priveleges of civil society.'

In the fourteenth century, Froissart was writing that Ireland had no towns to speak of, only 'high forests, great waters... and places uninhabitable'. The people lived in 'caves and small cottages, under trees and among bushes and hedges, like wild savage beasts'. He described the Irish as cruel enemies, given to ripping open the bellies of their captives, and eating their hearts.

So the Irish were considered as savages, barely distinguishable from those soon to be discovered in the New World fit only to be forcibly dispossessed, put down, and enslaved.

Of course the Irish differed from the Indians in being Christians, but after 1540, they became Christians of the wrong kind - at least as far as English Protestants were concerned, and the sopposed superstition and idolatry of their religion (a religion which the English had of course shared until the Reformation) was seen as mark of their primitive and unredeemed character.

Even after the conquest and reduction of Ireland in the ensuing century, English attitudes remained contemptuous and dismissive. To the Jacobean poet and conquistador, Sir John Drury, the Irish were 'little better than cannibals', and there are stories from that less than heroic period of colonial history of bounties paid for severed heads of the natives. A century later, Dean Swift was to pen his famous 'Modest Proposal' which invited the Irish to solve the linked problems of famine and over-population in Ireland by eating their own babies.

For those puzzled by the modern the history of Ireland, these attitudes will be revealing: savage Ireland may have been, but that savagery was mirrorred in the way that they were treated, and it is scarcely to be wondered at when savagery is repaid with savagery

Like their patron, the Irish have had their share of the abuse, enslavement and neglect. It is in the coping with this poisonous legacy that St Patrick offers so potent an example: the bitterness and hatreds which tore Ireland apart for so long are not the only ways in which the nation can deal with the legacy of its past. Like St.Patrick, those who have sufferred can look within themselves for a spirit which leads them away from the bitterness and resentment of victimhood and towards the message of reconciliation and hope that St.Patrick himself was to freely return to Ireland and preach.