Scottish-Roman-Irish St. Patrick

I came to the Irish heathens to preach the Good News and to put up with insults from unbelievers. I shall say to a people that was not mine, 'You are my people,' and to a nation I never pitied, 'I pity you'."
"I am Patrick, a sinner, the most unlearned of men, the lowliest of all the faithful, utterly worthless in the eyes of many." St. Patrick, Confession.

A simple, unlettered man with a miserable childhood in slavery, yet he had a vision that he was determined to share with others, and he chose Ireland as his flock. He lived to preach, to give hope to the heathen population that then represented Ireland's people, bringing them to Christianity. A simple man, with a memory of his own father's faith, he brought grace to his listeners through his own spoken passion.

And Ireland responded, honouring this man as a saint, and making him their patron saint, yearly recognizing his contribution to their emergence as a Christian society. Their faith as Catholics gave them strength of purpose and pride in themselves and their land, and their storied history. The puckish Irish humour, Irish story-telling and gifted wordiness embellished their deep and abiding faith.

All of these societal attributes did the people of the land well, as they suffered under British rule in the 17th Century. In mid-century, Ireland boasted three times its current population. But ownership of the land on which they lived was that of British landlords who rented out tiny parcels of land exorbitantly, on which indigent Irish families attempted to live in their tiny comfortless huts, growing potatoes, eking a life.

And then, suddenly those crops upon which the population depended collapsed into a slimy mass of stinking sludge. And Great Britain set up huge soup kitchens to which they herded the starving masses as though they were pigs taken to a trough. And the Irish desperately began to emigrate from a land that could no longer feed them. Largely because the British took their grain and dairy products for export.

In their mass migration the Irish settled in lands foreign to their birth, lending their industry and their vision and their faith to a new country, another continent which also saw them as labourers and expendable in their numbers as they died in malaria-infested swamps, and building canals, and farming in uncleared, rough acreages.

But their progeny lived and they prospered, and the new lands were glad at having absorbed them, and glad too to become as one with them each year in swearing admiration for that sweet Green Isle, concern for its 'troubles', and happy to lift a toast to St. Patrick.