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St Patrick’s Day commemorates the traditional date of death of Saint Patrick (around 461 AD), the patron saint of Ireland. It is observed every year on March 17 as a Catholic feast day and as the national holiday of Ireland.
When does St Patrick’s Day fall?
St Patrick’s Day is a fixed-date holiday on March 17 — the traditional date of Saint Patrick’s death, generally placed at 461 AD at Saul in modern-day County Down, Northern Ireland. It is a Catholic feast day worldwide (added to the universal Roman calendar in 1631) and the national public holiday of the Republic of Ireland.
It is a statutory public holiday in:
- Republic of Ireland — full bank holiday since 1903 (Irish Government Bank Holiday Act). When March 17 falls on a weekend, the public holiday moves to the following Monday.
- Northern Ireland — full bank holiday.
- Montserrat — the only country outside Ireland where it is a public holiday; commemorates both St Patrick and a 1768 slave uprising.
- Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada) — provincial holiday by long convention, observed on the nearest Monday.
Upcoming St Patrick’s Day dates
| Year | Date | Day of week |
|---|---|---|
| 2027 | March 17, 2027 | Wednesday |
| 2028 | March 17, 2028 | Friday |
| 2029 | March 17, 2029 | Saturday |
| 2030 | March 17, 2030 | Sunday |
| 2031 | March 17, 2031 | Monday |
When March 17 falls during Holy Week (the week before Easter), the Catholic liturgical celebration is moved earlier or later to avoid conflict with Holy Week observances. This last happened in 2008 (March 17 fell on Holy Monday); the Catholic feast was moved to March 14 while civil celebrations continued on the 17th.
Who was Saint Patrick?
The historical Patrick is unusually well documented for a 5th-century missionary, because two of his own writings survive: the Confessio (his spiritual autobiography) and the Letter to Coroticus (a protest against a British warlord who had enslaved Irish converts).
From these and later sources:
- Born in Roman Britain around 385–390 AD, probably in what is now western England, Wales, or southern Scotland. His father Calpurnius was a Christian deacon; his grandfather Potitus was a priest.
- Kidnapped at age 16 by Irish raiders and held as a slave in Ireland for six years, working as a herdsman. He attributes his deepening Christian faith to this period.
- Escaped by walking 200 miles to a port and crossing back to Britain.
- Studied for the priesthood, possibly in Gaul (modern France) under St Germanus of Auxerre, and was eventually consecrated as a bishop.
- Returned to Ireland as a missionary around 432 AD (the traditional date), founding the church at Armagh, which remains the primatial see of Ireland to this day.
- Died traditionally on March 17, 461 AD (some sources say 493 AD), at Saul in County Down. His burial place is traditionally Downpatrick Cathedral.
The popular stories — driving the snakes out of Ireland, using the shamrock to teach the Trinity, the miracles — do not appear in Patrick’s own writings. They emerge in later hagiographies, mostly from the 7th to 11th centuries: Tirechan’s Collectanea, Muirchu’s Vita Sancti Patricii, and the Tripartite Life of St Patrick.
Modern traditions and observance
- Dublin St Patrick’s Festival — the official five-day festival has run in its modern form since 1996, drawing around 500,000 to the central parade. Before 1995, public houses in Ireland were legally required to close on March 17.
- New York City Parade — since 1762; up to 150,000 marchers and 2 million spectators along Fifth Avenue. The oldest continuously-running St Patrick’s Day parade in the world.
- Boston Parade — since 1737, held in South Boston; coincides with Evacuation Day, the Massachusetts state holiday commemorating the British evacuation of Boston in 1776.
- Dyeing the Chicago River green — since 1962, by the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local 130 using a vegetable-based dye.
- Wearing of the green — the colour was associated with Irish nationalism by the late 18th century, supplanting Patrick’s original liturgical colour of blue (“St Patrick’s blue”, still used in some Irish state symbols).
- Greening of monuments — Tourism Ireland’s Global Greening campaign (since 2010) lights iconic buildings worldwide in green on March 17: the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls, the Pyramids of Giza, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, and dozens more.
Sources & references
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — St Patrick’s Day
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Saint Patrick
- Tourism Ireland — St Patrick’s Day
- Patrick (5th c.). Confessio — Patrick’s own surviving autobiography, available via the Royal Irish Academy / St Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack.
FAQs
March 17 is the traditional date of Saint Patrick’s death, generally placed at 461 AD at Saul in modern-day County Down, Northern Ireland. It became his feast day in the Catholic Church by the 9th or 10th century and was added to the universal Catholic liturgical calendar in 1631 by Pope Urban VIII at the request of Irish-born Franciscan Luke Wadding.
No — Patrick was born in Roman Britain, traditionally around 385–390 AD, probably in what is now western England, Wales, or southern Scotland. His own surviving writings (the Confessio and the Letter to Coroticus) say he was the son of a Roman-British deacon named Calpurnius. He was kidnapped by Irish raiders at age 16 and held as a slave in Ireland for six years before escaping back to Britain, then later returning to Ireland as a Christian missionary.
No — Ireland never had native snakes. The island was cut off from continental Europe by rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age before snakes recolonised the British Isles. The legend is a metaphor for Patrick’s missionary work: snakes in early Christian symbolism represented the pagan Druidic religion he is credited with displacing. It first appears in writing in the Tripartite Life of St Patrick (11th century), centuries after his death.
Tradition holds that Patrick used the three-leafed shamrock (Irish seamróg) to teach the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three distinct persons in one God. The earliest written record of this teaching appears in the 17th century in the writings of Caleb Threlkeld (1726), not in any of Patrick’s own surviving works. The shamrock as Irish national symbol predates the teaching legend and goes back to pre-Christian Celtic vegetative symbolism.
The tradition began in 1962, when Chicago plumber Stephen Bailey of the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local Union 130 (and parade chairman) realised that the orange-coloured dye they used to trace illegal sewage discharges into the river turned bright green in water. The original 1962 dyeing used 100 pounds of dye and lasted a week. The modern dyeing uses a smaller amount (around 40 pounds) of a vegetable-based, biodegradable formula and lasts five to six hours.
Yes — the New York City St Patrick’s Day Parade dates from 1762, when Irish soldiers in the British army marched through what was then the British colony of New York. The parade has been held every year except 2020 and 2021 (COVID-19), making it one of the longest-running annual parades in the world and predating both the United States (1776) and the Republic of Ireland (1922). It draws around 2 million spectators annually.