On the misty bogs of Ireland writers pay no taxes

As sure as I’m partly Irish, another March 17 will come and go and I still won’t have any idea if St. Patrick really drove those snakes out of Ireland.

I got interested in the snake question when I visited Ireland a few years ago. I was there for more than three weeks and didn’t see a single snake, let alone a plague of them wriggling across the misty bogs.

I was left to conclude that either St. Patrick really did chase them all away 1,500 years ago or there were never any snakes around in the first place. If the whole story was a crock, I wanted to know.

Yet in none of the books I have read recently on the man, not even in those moldy old treatises about druids and pagans and early Christians, have I been able to find one explanation of the famous snake incident that first intrigued me as a boy.

One musty little book insisted that St. Patrick had driven out “a pest of snakes,” but the author dropped the subject without elaboration. I was left to wonder how many snakes constituted a “pest.” The author suggested it might have been “the serpent of paganism that he conquered,” which would make more sense than trying to imagine the venerable Archbishop of Armagh working part-time as a snake wrangler.

In my research, however, I did learn something about St. Patrick — namely, that he has an awful sketchy biography for someone whose name has been so widely celebrated for centuries.

He was born in either Wales or Scotland, in 387 A.D. or thereafter, on either March 8, March 9, or a combination of the two equaling March 17.

Others say he probably died on March 17, in 493 A.D., give or take a decade or two.

Patrick’s father was a Roman named Calpurnius, his mother a wise and good woman named Conchessa. They introduced their son to Latin scripture until he was 16, at which time he was kidnapped by a band of marauding invaders and carried to Ireland to become the slave of a druid named Milchu.

After tending sheep in the mountains for six years, the young Patrick escaped to the coast, boarded a ship and returned home to become a priest. Later, as an apostle to Erin, he suffered imprisonment, torture, and years of persecution while converting Ireland’s pagan population to Christianity and becoming one of the country’s greatest martyrs.

How interesting, then, that we now honor this man of piety, humility and religious zeal by wearing paper hats with cardboard shamrocks glued to the front and guzzling gallons of green beer.

My first memorable St. Patrick’s Day took place when I was 5 or 6 and living in New York. Sitting on the stoop with the family, I looked up to see a white Chevy convertible squealing around the corner on two wheels. The car was pursued by several red-faced young men who ricocheted beer cans off its hood.

The terrified driver smashed into a few trash cans as he swerved through the street to shake off two guys who had attached themselves like windsocks to the car’s bumper.

“The St. Paddy’s Day parade must be over,” muttered our Italian neighbor as the festive car hurtled noisily down the street.

As the years pass, I’m beginning to think there must be a better way to celebrate our rich Irish heritage than by wearing “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons while lying on our backs on barroom floors across America.

Perhaps a bit of Ireland-related trivia, from Brian E. Cooper’s “Irish-American Almanac,” will give us something more meangingful to ponder on Sunday as we hunt for that pair of horrid green socks we wear only once a year.

Did you know, for instance, that Barbara Bush’s Gaelic name is Gormfhlaith Bush, which means “The Stranger Lady,” or that the town of Briarwood Beach, Ohio, is the only community in America that observes St. Patrick’s Day as a legal holiday?

Did you know that the Irish wolfhound is the tallest breed of dog recognized by the American Kennel Club, or that as many as two-thirds of the soldiers fighting for the North during the Civil War were of Irish birth or descent?

Ireland also boasts more golf courses per square mile than any other country, which offers a wonderful way to spend money for the Irish writers, artists and composers who pay no taxes if their work is “generally recognized as having cultural or artistic merit” by the Revenue Commissioners.

In County Mayo, you might be interested to know, is a village with the longest placename in Ireland: Cooneenashkirroogohifrinn. It means “the little harbor sliding into hell.”

Filled with this new sense of Irishness, let us all raise a glass to a friend on Sunday and offer this warmest of toasts:

Here’s to you, as good as you are

Here’s to me, as bad as I am

As good as you are and as bad as I am

I’m as good as you are, as bad as I am.