Driving out more than Snakes

As you probably noticed, St Patrick’s Day happened a couple of weeks ago. The team here decided that celebrations were in order. So we all took the day off (it’s a bank holiday, so most of us weren’t working anyway) and went to Downpatrick. This little town, less than an hour away from Belfast, claims several links to St Patrick’s life. There’s a tiny church a couple of miles outside of town, in a place called Saul, which is built on the site of St Patrick’s first church in Ireland. The Church of Ireland cathedral in Downpatrick is home of one of the sites where St Patrick is rumoured to be buried. (It’s one of the more reliable claims to be his grave.)

Jessica and I got up early that morning and headed out to Downpatrick to go to the 9.30am service in Saul. This was a lovely ecumenical service, standing room only, focused on the idea of unity and peace. It was followed by a pilgrimage prayer walk through the countryside, ending at the cathedral in Downpatrick, where we joined the rest of the team for another service. They’d all decided to sleep in, so they had caught a later bus to Downpatrick and had coffee and breakfast in town before the noon service began. It was another lovely service, which included Irish music and Irish dancing, and again focused on peace and unity.

St Patrick has been put forward as the best possible example for peace in Northern Ireland. He was originally from Britian, possibly from England, and taken to Ireland as a slave. Years later, free again, he returned to Ireland as a missionary, and is now the patron saint. There is no better symbol of British-Irish harmony. And yet, St Patrick’s Day is celebrated much more by Catholics than Protestants – more on this later.

After the church service, we went to the parade in Downpatrick. It was a rather small-time affair, with decidedly fewer marching bands than we’re used to (which might have something to do with the lack of high school football for said marching bands to play at), but still fun. Most people went back after the parade, but a few of us stayed around for a while longer and wandered through town, where there were musicians and dancers performing at various venues. St Patrick’s Day here is often thought of as a Catholic/nationalist holiday. A lot of people at my church said they rarely do anything to celebrate it. A lot of people at the parade wore tricolour wigs (the colours of the Irish flag) or had Irish flags painted on their faces or were actually wearing the flag as a cape. The bus ride from Downpatrick to Belfast passes through several different nationalist and unionist areas. As I was coming back in the early evening, it was a pretty clear division. The nationalist areas were teeming with people, many of them dressed in green or tricolour, quite a few standing outside overcrowded pubs. Bars in the unionist areas looked busier than usual but not packed, and there weren’t nearly as many people wandering the streets. The most surprising to me was driving past a park in a unionist area, where we passed two young men wearing flags – but not the Irish one, as I’d seen all day. One of the boys wore a British flag, and the other an Ulster flag, the symbol of the counties of Northern Ireland. It struck me as a very blatant, and perhaps even argumentative, re-assertion of Britishness amidst the Irish holiday.

The clergy who spoke at various services on St Patrick’s Day highlighted the unifying potential of St Patrick. He is widely regarded as the patron saint of all Ireland, not just the Republic of Ireland. He is a Christian saint, accepted by both Catholics and Protestants. He himself led an exemplary life. There was a glimmer of hope in the clergy’s voices that if Northern Ireland could unite behind this saint, then they could truly unite. Perhaps it’s naivete to believe than one figure could alter so much. But you have to start somewhere. St Patrick changed Ireland once, and just maybe, he can help change it again. Word of the Week: “Wee.” You’re probably familiar with this Irish idiom. It means “small,” but is not always used literally. For example, one of the guys in my youth group refers to the “funny wee man” who sings to himself on the bus. The man in question is probably bigger than the boy talking, but in this case “wee” doesn’t necessarily refer to size. It’s much the same way that people in the States would refer to a “little old lady” regardless of how tall the lady actually is. My personal favourite use of “wee,” however, is when it gets used to compare the size of two things. One of the things will be “wee-er” than the other one. It makes me laugh every time.