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The feast in early Ireland
Patrick died on 17 March, probably around 461.
His chosen headquarters had been Armagh, a small, beautiful city just outside the walls of the ancient Ulster capital of Eamhain Mhacha. After his death, the bishops and abbots of Armagh – backed by the powerful O’Neill kings and high kings – heavily promoted Patrick as the preeminent national apostle, probably to support their claims of leadership for the church in Ireland. Arguably Kildare was more powerful, and its patron Brigid more popular until 900 AD.
The Law of Patrick, Cáin Phátraic, was proclaimed across Ireland in 737 and enforced with circuits of his relics, which means parades in his name were happening more than 1,200 years ago. His feast had its own verse in the martyrology of Óengus, around the year 800. By 1113 the annals record thirty pilgrims killed by lightning on Croagh Patrick [link], so a pilgrimage to that site must have been already well established.
Medieval observance meant Mass, prayers, sermons on Patrick’s life, and in some areas processions or parades to local holy sites. Pilgrimages to Armagh, Downpatrick, Saul and Croagh Patrick were also popular. The day falls inside Lent, so it was not a party. It was a holy day.
The Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding is generally credited with getting Patrick’s feast onto the universal Church calendar in the 1630s, which formalised what Ireland had done for centuries.
The saint’s day becomes Ireland’s day
The shamrock custom is documented from the 1600s. Saint Patrick’s crosses, small badges of ribbon and paper, were worn on the day as well.
Green arrived later, and through politics rather than religion. The green harp flag was flown by Irish confederate forces from the 1640s. The United Irishmen took green as their colour in the 1790s, and the ballad “The Wearing of the Green” fixed it in memory. By the nineteenth century green meant Ireland.
Ireland made 17 March a public holiday in 1903, under an act brought by the MP James O’Mara.
Emigration and the parade
Irish emigration took off after the defeats of the 1600s, and became enormous during and after the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. Millions went to the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and Argentina.
In those countries the Irish were often poor and often unwelcome. Saint Patrick’s Day became the day the community appeared in public, in numbers, in good order. That is what the parade was for.
The earliest documented Saint Patrick’s Day celebration in the Americas is not in Boston or New York. In 2017 the historian J. Michael Francis found records in Spanish colonial accounts in Seville showing gunpowder fired for the feast in St. Augustine, Florida in 1600, and a street procession there in 1601. The town’s Irish priest, Richard Arthur, seems to have been behind it. He disappears from the record around 1604 and the celebration disappears with him.
The continuous tradition starts later. Boston’s Charitable Irish Society marked the day from 1737. New York’s parade was first recorded in 1762, when Irish soldiers in British service marched through the city. It has run almost every year since and is the oldest continuous parade of any kind in the United States. Philadelphia and other cities followed in the same century.
Ireland catches up
Ireland had processions of its own long before it had a national parade. Aside from the religious circuits, processions and ‘patterns’ going back to medieval times, temperance societies held large marches on 17 March in the 1840s.
With heavy backing from the Irish cultural renewal movement, gaining steam since the 1880s, many Irish cities started holding parades in the 1900s, with a focus on Irish music, dance and language alongside religion and history. Waterford ran a parade from 1903. The Irish Volunteers paraded across the country on the day in 1916, and the police counted 38 separate processions.
What Ireland did not have was a big official civic parade. Dublin held its first in 1931. For decades after that the Irish day stayed modest. It was a holy day of obligation, and the pubs were closed by law on 17 March from 1927 until 1960. Emigrants writing home about American parades were describing something Ireland did not do.
That changed in the 1990s. The government created the St. Patrick’s Festival, first held in 1996, and turned a single parade into a multi-day national event. Tourism was part of the reasoning. So was a new confidence about Irish culture. Ireland took the diaspora’s version of the holiday and rebuilt it at home.
The day goes global
Estimates of the worldwide Irish diaspora run to about 70 million people, though the figure is soft and depends entirely on how you count ancestry. Around 31 to 32 million Americans report Irish ancestry.
The holiday spread beyond that diaspora for a few reasons. Irish pubs opened everywhere from the 1980s. Irish music and dance had a global moment. The day is easy to join, cheap to stage, and has no political baggage in most countries. Businesses found it profitable.
Tourism Ireland now runs a Global Greening campaign that lights landmarks green on 17 March, from the Sydney Opera House to Niagara Falls.