One thing that I am amazed to never having seen written about what a sensitive topic Northern Ireland has been is St. Patrick. This is something that I really think should have gotten attention.
There were thirty-two counties in Ireland. Of those the six counties in the north had a Protestant-majority population. In 1922 these six counties were separated from Catholic-majority Ireland, joining Britain as Northern Ireland. But it has never been a comfortable arrangement.
Maybe part of the problem is St. Patrick. St. Patrick is so important to Ireland. St. Patrick is the very soul of Ireland. March 17 is believed to be the day that St. Patrick died and St. Patrick's Day is now celebrated in many countries.
The trouble is that the places in Ireland that are most closely associated with St. Patrick are in the northern part of the island. When the border of Northern Ireland was drawn it left the sites most closely associated with Ireland's patron saint outside of Ireland.
St. Patrick was first captured on the coast of Britain by Irish pirates, and taken as a slave to Ireland. He was put to work tending sheep on a farm. He was from a religious family and really renewed his faith during six years of working as a shepherd. He had no idea where he was but one day God gave him a vision of how to escape and he got back home.
He continued to study Christianity, reportedly in France. Then he got the feeling that God wanted him to return to Ireland, not as a slave but as a missionary, and the rest is history. St. Patrick famously used a shamrock to show how God is three, the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and yet also one, and now the shamrock is the symbol of Ireland.
But the place where St. Patrick landed by boat upon his return to Ireland is in County Down, which is now part of Northern Ireland. St. Patrick's tomb is in Downpatrick, also in County Down. St. Patrick is believed to have traveled around most of Ireland but his home base is in what is now Northern Ireland.
Armagh was Ireland's first city, and it was the ecclesiastical center of the country thanks to St. Patrick himself, but it is now outside of Ireland.
There is a cathedral at Armagh, on the very site where St. Patrick built his church. As we might expect it is called "St. Patrick's Cathedral". But it is not a Catholic cathedral. It belongs to the Church of Ireland, which is Protestant as part of the Anglican Communion. Although the Anglican Church does recognize St. Patrick as a saint.
There is a Catholic St. Patrick's Cathedral not far away, but might it be more appropriate if the cathedral on the very site of St. Patrick's church was Catholic? Anglicans are not the majority Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland, there are more Presbyterians.
Slemish Hill, which is traditionally believed to be the site where St. Patrick tended sheep during his time as a young slave in Ireland, is also in Northern Ireland. Although some people think that, given Patrick's description of where he was and that he had to travel a very long way to get to the boat that would take him back to Britain, County Mayo in western Ireland is a more likely location.
Might there have been a lot less tension over Northern Ireland if the tomb of St. Patrick, as well as the places that were important in his life and Ireland's oldest city and religious center, had been left in Ireland? Maybe the secular climate of 1921, when the border was drawn, led to underestimating how important a religious figure like St. Patrick might be.
This is yet another example of "How Secularism Leads Us Astray", as we saw in the posting by that name April 2020.
It seems that, in drawing the border, the traditional counties of Ireland were considered as sacrosanct. If a county had a Protestant majority it went to Northern Ireland. What if County Down and County Armagh could have been divided and a new county created, maybe named "County St. Patrick", that included the important sites of St. Patrick, and left in Ireland?
The partition of Ireland was, in a way, a model for the partition of India. But two states were divided there, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east.
What is so ironic about the Northern Ireland situation was the assassination of Mountbatten, who had presided over the partition of India. He was a great admirer of Ireland, being actually killed on vacation in the Irish Republic, and wanted the reunification of Ireland.
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