Tidying Up The Context for Patrick's Day

Lismore grew in time to be a great religious city, and a school of sacred sciences, to which pilgrims from all over Ireland and scholars from beyond the seas resorted.

—Patrick Power, Waterford & Lismore A Compendious History of the United Dioceses Cork University Press 1937 pg. 5.

As late as the 15th cent. the primacy of Lismore, among the Sanctuaries and Schools of Munster, seems to have been tacitly acknowledged. In recognition of the status in question, special immunities were granted to the city and church of Lismore, as well as to the attached manors, by the Provincial Synod, held at Limerick in 1453. These included freedom from exactions by anyone, even the Lord of Desmond, or the king's representative.

—See Appendix XIII.

Freedom from exactions sounds like a pretty sweet arrangement but the sordid truth is that, at least as passed down through my family's recollection, it was earned as tradeoff for Lismore locally settling with firm finality the whole snakes-out-of-Ireland controversy fomented from the first by fans of Patrick and occasioning there in Lismore as elsewhere throughout the Wooded Isle centuries of objectively unnecessary commentary ornamenting almost every conceivable aspect of the matter.

This local settlement did not countenance expression of certain divergent views, divergent in the sense that they strayed too far from the hard won consensus that for the good of all this snake-related nonsense must cease and Patrickology must move on.

In this way my forebears enlisted in a project of not only denying a place in Lismore to the snakes per Patrick, but actively subduing any idle talk of them as might arise in Lismore's vicinity from time to time as well.

Saints Be Praised, the Anniversary Issue

To our knowledge, no one has successfully rebutted the opinion that St. Patrick was a real person, however much the snakes remain unconvinced by direct personal experience of the matter. They have their own measure, their own skein of consequential events stretching back to the beginnings of their snakey kind, and Patrick does not appear there among those events, in point of fact.

They are keenly aware they may be summarily removed, of course, the snakes. That knowledge is given to every living thing, and each incorporates the prudent list of tactics for eluding such potentialities, the snakes being no exception to the rule.

St. Patrick in a rich enough symbology might represent to your practicing snake the embodiment of that threat of complete and general extirpation: the summing metonym of all the forces tending towards its elimination. But mark this: there's no evidence whatsoever that snakes think that way. We must not impute to them a snakey hinduism in which the role of the Destroyer, Siva, is taken up by the Celtic Missionary. No.

But that is not to deny to snakes their willful slithery adherence to Patrick's hallowed plan, however little credence they give to its existence. It's a feature of their design, is what I'm saying, a predisposed quality of their being. All of them built aversive to Ireland from the go, built to never be and to never have been deployed in such a place.

That the snakes were not accessible for deportation did not trouble the foundations of the fellow's views on ridding Ireland of them in the slightest.

It must be noted that the command, "Remove the Snakes!" is one of the more universally agreeable pronouncements, even when made far beyond the slithering circuit of the things where the satisfying likelihood that they will never appear greets all such talk.

The Saint's hallowed plan allowed for an arduous time of it describing once again what a snake was to his audience before the common wisdom of the matter could be fully received. In the event, they opened their minds to his knowledges, accepting both the premise of the snake itself as described by his holiness and his proscriptive plan for each and every one of them as well.

The snakes weren't there when Patrick arrived to send them away. But after him, they went missing from the place they'd never been. He made his mark, Patrick, is what I'm saying.