91 Fun Facts About St Pattys Day

Which musical instrument is Ireland's national emblem, stamped on every Irish coin?

Harp: Ireland registered only left-facing harps as its state emblem, because Guinness had been using a right-facing harp as its trademark since the 1870s.

In Irish tradition, what is a shillelagh?

A wooden cudgel: cut from blackthorn or oak with a heavy knob, the shillelagh passed as a walking stick, and its name is usually traced to a village whose oak forests supplied the wood.

St Patrick's Day always falls inside which season of the Christian calendar?

Lent: Ash Wednesday is never later than 10 March and Easter never earlier than 22 March, so the feast always lands inside the fast, and the day's dispensation let people eat and drink.

According to legend, what creatures did St. Patrick famously banish from Ireland?

Snakes: Ireland never had any to banish, and the earliest text crediting Patrick with driving them out dates only from the late twelfth century, some 700 years after he lived.

Which colour was traditionally linked with St Patrick before green took over?

Blue: the Anglo-Irish Order of St Patrick, founded in 1783, took sky blue as its colour, while the United Irishmen adopted green in the 1790s and green won out.

Which U.S. city staged the first recorded St. Patrick's Day parade, back in 1601?

St. Augustine: the 1601 parade in Spanish Florida, organised by the colony's Irish vicar Ricardo Artur, predates Boston's 1737 celebration and New York's first parade by more than a century.

Which solitary fairy of Irish folklore is a shoemaker by trade?

Leprechaun: folklore makes him a solitary cobbler, usually seen working on a single shoe, and anyone who catches him can demand his hidden treasure in exchange for his release.

What dish, often served with cabbage, is popular on St. Patrick's Day in the United States?

Corned beef: it is not a traditional Irish dish, since beef was long too dear in Ireland and bacon was the everyday meat; Irish-Americans paired cheap corned beef with cabbage.

The Irish word 'seamróg', from which 'shamrock' derives, literally means what?

Young clover is all it means, yet Elizabethan English writers thought the Irish ate it, possibly confusing seamróg with seamsóg, the word for wood sorrel.

Which major US city has dyed its river green for St. Patrick's Day since 1962?

Chicago got the idea from workers who were using green dye to trace illegal waste discharges into the river, and saw that the same dye could turn the whole river green for the holiday.

Besides Ireland, on which Caribbean island is St. Patrick's Day a public holiday?

Montserrat: Irish settlers arrived from St Kitts in the 1600s, and the island's holiday now also honours a slave uprising planned for the day in 1768, which failed.

In Irish traditional music, the violin is almost always called by what name?

Fiddle: it is the same instrument as the violin, and the records Sligo emigrant Michael Coleman cut in New York in the 1920s sailed home as imports and reshaped how fiddlers in Ireland played.

Patrick's own account of his life, one of his two surviving writings, has what Latin title?

Confessio: written late in his life to answer accusers among his fellow churchmen, it tells how a voice in a dream told the young slave that his ship was ready.

What does the traditional Irish phrase 'Erin go Bragh' mean?

Ireland forever: the Irish literally says 'Ireland until the end of time'; rebels used it in the 1790s, and Irish deserters later fought the US Army under a green flag bearing the motto.

St. Patrick's Day is celebrated in March because it is believed to be the anniversary of what event?

His death: early Christians treated the day a saint died as a 'birthday' into heaven, so feast days mark deaths, and tradition holds that Patrick died on this date.

Legend says St. Patrick used the three leaves of a shamrock to explain which Christian doctrine to the Irish?

The Holy Trinity story was first written down in 1726, yet coins struck decades earlier already show Patrick holding up a shamrock to a crowd.

New York's first St Patrick's Day marches, in the 1760s, were held by Irish soldiers serving in which army?

British: New York was still a British colony, and Irish soldiers stationed there marched in the 1760s, years before the Declaration of Independence.

Which Irish dish mashes potatoes together with cabbage or kale?

Colcannon: the name is thought to come from the Irish for 'white-headed cabbage', and it became a staple because potatoes and cabbage were cheap all year round.

Guinness, the drink most tied to St. Patrick's Day, is which style of beer?

Stout: the word first meant simply 'strong', as in 'stout porter', and Guinness sold porter for decades before it put the word on a beer in the 1840s.

Which bouncy Irish dance tune comes in double, single and slip varieties?

Jig: the dance swept the British Isles in the 16th century and crossed to the Continent, where as the gigue it became the closing movement of the Baroque suite.

What traditional Irish ring shows two hands holding a crowned heart?

Claddagh Ring: it is named after a fishing village beside Galway, and legend credits Richard Joyce, said to have learned goldsmithing as a captive in Algiers and brought the design home.

Which NHL team was known as the St. Patricks and wore green jerseys from 1919 to 1927?

Toronto Maple Leafs: the club played in green as the Toronto St. Patricks from 1919 until Conn Smythe's group bought it in 1927 and renamed it the Maple Leafs.

Which regiment, raised among New York's Irish, traditionally leads the city's St Patrick's Day parade?

The Fighting 69th: the nickname is said to have come from Robert E. Lee, whose army faced the regiment in the Civil War, and it has led the city's marchers since about 1851.

The 'Paddy' in St Paddy's Day is short for which Irish form of the name Patrick?

Pádraig: its pet form is Paddy, which is why 'St Patty's Day' is a slip: Patty is short for Patricia, not Patrick.

Tradition holds that St Patrick is buried in which Northern Irish town?

Downpatrick: a slab of Mourne granite beside its cathedral marks the supposed grave, but the stone was only set there in 1900, some fourteen centuries after he died.

Irish soda bread rises because bicarbonate of soda reacts with the acid in which ingredient?

Buttermilk: its lactic acid meets the bicarbonate of soda and gives off carbon dioxide at once, so the loaf needs no yeast and no time to rise.

Which landmark was among the first two lit green for Tourism Ireland's 'Global Greening' in 2010?

Sydney Opera House: it and Auckland's Sky Tower were the first two landmarks lit for Tourism Ireland's Global Greening in 2010, a campaign that later spread to hundreds of sites worldwide.

Which Irish dance show began as a seven-minute interval act at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest?

Riverdance: the interval act grew into a full stage show within a year, and its star Michael Flatley then quit over creative control to launch a rival, Lord of the Dance.

In the old custom of 'drowning the shamrock', where did the sprig worn all day end up?

In the last drink: the sprig went into the final glass of the night, a toast was drunk, and the shamrock was then fished out and thrown over the left shoulder.

The orange stripe of the Irish tricolour stands for which community?

Irish Protestants: orange recalls William of Orange, green stands for Catholics, and the white between them for a lasting truce, as Thomas Francis Meagher, who first flew the flag in 1848, put it.

Kissing which Irish stone is said to bestow the 'gift of the gab'?

Blarney Stone: it is set high in a castle parapet, so kissing it means hanging head downward over the drop, and before guide rails were fitted helpers held kissers by the ankles.

On the ISS in 2011, Catherine Coleman played a flute and tin whistle borrowed from which Irish band?

The recording later appeared as 'The Chieftains in Orbit' on the band's 2012 album Voice of Ages.

Which small squeezebox is a staple of Irish music sessions?

Concertina: by the mid-1900s it had fallen out of fashion and few makers were left, but the Anglo type lived on in pockets, Irish traditional music among them.

Dripsey's 23.4-metre St Patrick's Day parade ran between the Cork village's two what?

Pubs: the march went from the door of one pub to the door of the other and was billed as the world's shortest, until one of the two closed and the tradition ended.

What is the name of the ancient Celtic writing system sometimes seen in Irish art and monuments?

Ogham: its letters are notches cut along a stone's edge, and though most inscriptions give only a man's name and his father's, they are the earliest record of the Irish language.

The uilleann pipes, Ireland's national bagpipe, take their name from the Irish word for which body part?

Elbow: 'uilleann' comes from the Irish 'uille', elbow, because the bag is filled by a bellows worked under the player's arm rather than by blowing, which lets some pipers sing while playing.

In Irish folklore, what is the name for a mermaid or merman, anglicised from the Irish word murúch?

Merrow: tales give each one a magic cap for passing through the sea; steal it and she cannot go back under the waves, which is how one Kerry man keeps his merrow wife.

Which famous early medieval illuminated manuscript is housed at Trinity College Dublin?

Book of Kells: thieves stole it from the church at Kells about a thousand years ago for its jewelled gold cover, and it turned up months later under a sod, the cover torn off.

Which traditional Irish sport, similar to field hockey, is played with a sliotar?

Hurling: the game is old enough to feature in Irish legend, where in one telling the boy Sétanta kills a guard dog by driving a sliotar down its throat and becomes Cú Chulainn, 'Culann's hound'.

The Irish drinking toast 'Sláinte!' literally means what?

Health: 'sláinte' is simply the Irish noun for health, so the toast wishes it on the company; the customary reply is 'sláinte agatsa', 'health to you too'.

Which giant of Irish legend is said to have built the Giant's Causeway as a path to Scotland?

Finn MacCool: in a common telling he hides from the far bigger Scottish giant Benandonner, disguised by his wife as a baby, and the Scot, dreading the father's size, flees home tearing up the causeway.

Which country landed troops in Ireland in 1798 to support the United Irishmen's rebellion?

France: a small French force under General Humbert landed in the west and, with Irish rebels, routed a larger Crown army so fast that the flight was dubbed the 'Castlebar Races'.

What type of cross, often found in Ireland, features a ring around the intersection of the arms?

The Celtic Cross is a distinctive Christian symbol originating in Ireland and Great Britain, characterized by a cross with a circle surrounding the intersection of the arms.

Which Irish song about a betrayed highwayman was a 1973 hit for Thin Lizzy and later covered by Metallica?

'Whiskey in the Jar': The Dubliners made it a signature song in the 1960s, and its plot resembles a broadside ballad about the real highwayman Patrick Fleming, executed in 1650.

What is the Irish title of the prime minister who brings a bowl of shamrock to the White House each March?

Taoiseach: an old Irish word for a chief or leader, it became the head of government's title in the 1937 constitution and is used even in English; the deputy is the Tánaiste.

What is the name for the traditional Irish drum, played with a stick called a 'tipper'?

Bodhrán: for all its ancient look, the frame drum had almost died out until the 1960s, when composer Seán Ó Riada played it in his folk ensemble and sessions took it up.

Which Irish county is known as the 'Garden of Ireland'?

Wicklow: the nickname honours its wooded hills and glens, scenery that has also made the county a favourite film location, with Excalibur among the features shot there.

Patrick writes that after six years enslaved in Ireland he escaped home to which land?

Britain: Ireland's patron saint was not Irish; raiders carried him off from his family's home at sixteen, and after his escape he chose to go back to Ireland as a missionary.

As a slave in Ireland, the teenage Patrick worked as what?

A herder: Patrick writes that he tended sheep every day and, out on the hills before dawn in snow, ice and rain, came to pray as many as a hundred times a day.

Who are Ireland's other two patron saints alongside Patrick?

Brigid and Columba: legend has all three sharing one grave, a story that rests on the Norman knight John de Courcy, who claimed in the 12th century to have found their bones together.

Besides Ireland, Patrick is the patron saint of which African country?

Nigeria: an Irish missionary society named after Patrick was founded on his feast day in 1932 to work in Nigeria, where he is now an official patron saint alongside Mary.

Patrick's surviving letter condemns Coroticus's soldiers for doing what to his converts?

Enslaving: the raiders cut down some newly baptised converts and sold others abroad, and Patrick, once carried off as a slave himself, wrote to denounce them.

Which Georgia city held its first St. Patrick's Day parade in 1824?

Savannah: the city's Hibernian Society organised its first St. Patrick's Day parade in 1824, and the event grew into one of the largest in the United States.

Tradition says Patrick founded his main church in which city, now home to two cathedrals named after him?

Armagh: because of that claim it became the church capital of Ireland, and both the Catholic and the Church of Ireland primates still have their seats there.

Which country honours the St Patrick's Battalion, mostly Irish soldiers who switched sides to fight the US Army in the 1840s?

Mexico: the San Patricios, many of them deserters from the US Army, manned Mexican guns in the war of 1846 to 1848, and Mexico still honours them each St Patrick's Day.

On which Mayo mountain is St Patrick said to have fasted for forty days?

Croagh Patrick: locals call it 'the Reek', and on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, thousands of pilgrims climb it, some of them barefoot as a penance.

The Old Irish protective prayer 'Faeth Fiada' is known in English as Saint Patrick's what?

Breastplate: the Lorica, or St Patrick's Breastplate, was read by medieval editors as 'Deer's Cry', from a tale of Patrick's monks appearing to an ambush as deer; the phrase more likely means a mist of concealment.

After 1801 the red saltire of St Patrick was combined with two other crosses to form what?

The Union Jack: the Act of Union added St Patrick's red saltire to the crosses of St George and St Andrew in 1801; the saltire's link to Patrick only dates from the Order of St Patrick in 1783.

Which king created the Order of St Patrick in 1783?

George III: he founded the Order of St Patrick in 1783 to reward support in the Irish Parliament; regular appointments ended in 1922, and the last surviving knight, the Duke of Gloucester, died in 1974.

What became of the Order of St Patrick's 'Irish Crown Jewels' in 1907?

Stolen: the jewelled star and badge vanished from Dublin Castle with the collars of five knights, and the theft has never been solved.

In 1922 the new Irish Free State ordered all of what to be painted green?

Post boxes: the Free State repainted the red British pillar boxes green in 1922 but left the royal ciphers cast in the iron, so hundreds of green boxes still carry a monarch's initials.

Which parliament made St Patrick's Day a public holiday in Ireland in 1903?

Westminster: Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom, so Irish MP James O'Mara introduced the Bank Holiday (Ireland) Act in the UK Parliament, almost two decades before independence.

Which city held Ireland's first St Patrick's Day parade, during Irish Language Week?

Waterford: the 1903 procession, part of Irish Language Week, was held on Sunday 15 March and ended in the People's Park with the Mayor addressing the crowd.

An old American gardening tradition names St Patrick's Day as the day to plant which crop?

Peas: the old rule works because peas like a chilly start, and by mid-March the soil in much of the country has thawed enough to dig.

In 2001 Ireland postponed its celebrations to May because of which outbreak?

Foot-and-mouth disease: Ireland called off the March festival as a precaution while the outbreak raged next door, held it in May instead, and came through with a single confirmed case.

Which dog breed has been the Irish Guards' regimental mascot since 1902?

Irish wolfhound: a breeders' club presented the first one, Brian Boru, hoping the publicity would make the breed more popular with the public.

Skyfest, for years the centrepiece of Ireland's St Patrick's Festival, was what kind of show?

A fireworks display: Skyfest began in the capital, went on the road in 2008 to a different town each year, and was cancelled for good in 2012.

In 1952 the Irish ambassador mailed a box of shamrocks to which US president, starting a custom?

Harry S. Truman: Ambassador John Hearne sent the box in 1952; the in-person White House handover only became an annual fixture after Albert Reynolds met Bill Clinton in 1994.

Who began presenting the Irish Guards with their St Patrick's Day shamrock in 2012?

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge: she took over the presentation in 2012, and fresh sprigs are flown out from Ireland to wherever the regiment is serving, at home or abroad.

Which royal began the tradition of presenting shamrock to the Irish Guards in 1901?

Queen Alexandra: she began the custom in 1901, a year after Queen Victoria raised the Irish Guards in 1900 to honour Irish soldiers' service in the Boer War.

Which English city's St Patrick's Day parade is billed as the world's third biggest, after Dublin and New York?

Birmingham: the parade was called off after the 1974 bombings in the city, along with other public celebrations of Irish culture, and came back only years later.

In 2008, green dye went into the fountains of which London landmark?

Trafalgar Square: its fountains ran green in 2008, and the square is the usual end point of London's St Patrick's Day parade, held on a weekend around the 17th since 2002.

Which denomination added Patrick's feast to its liturgical calendar in 2017?

Russian Orthodox Church: its Holy Synod added Patrick and other pre-Schism Western saints to the calendar in March 2017, keeping his feast on 17 March Old Style, which falls on 30 March New Style.

Which Canadian city's St Patrick's Day parade was first held in 1824?

Montreal: the parade began in 1824, and the city flag carries a shamrock in its lower-right quadrant for its Irish founders, alongside a fleur-de-lis, a rose and a thistle.

On which Canadian island is St Patrick's Day a holiday for provincial government workers?

Newfoundland: so many Irish settled there that the Irish language has its own name for the island, Talamh an Éisc, 'land of the fish', and about a fifth of islanders claim Irish roots.

Which satirist served as dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin for more than thirty years?

Jonathan Swift: the author of Gulliver's Travels was dean from 1713 until he died in 1745, and he left most of his fortune to found a hospital for the mentally ill that still bears the saint's name.

Evacuation Day, a 17 March holiday in Suffolk County, is observed in which US state?

Massachusetts: Evacuation Day marks the British leaving Boston on 17 March 1776 after Washington fortified Dorchester Heights, and Boston's Irish population helped make the date an official holiday.

Which trade union has sponsored the dyeing of a US city's river green for St Patrick's Day since 1962?

Plumbers: Journeymen Plumbers Local 130 has run the dyeing since 1962, replacing the original fluorescein, ruled out on environmental grounds, with a vegetable-based dye whose formula the union keeps secret.

Who had the White House fountains dyed green for St Patrick's Day in 2009?

Michelle Obama: in her first March as first lady she asked for the White House fountains to run green, and the gesture became a yearly tradition there.

Which green, mint-flavoured milkshake does McDonald's sell around St Patrick's Day?

Shamrock Shake: sales of the shake in 1974 helped fund the first Ronald McDonald House in Philadelphia; a 1980 spin-off, the Shamrock Sundae, lasted just one year.

Why has St Patrick never been formally canonised by a pope?

No such process existed yet: in Patrick's day local churches simply acclaimed their own saints, and the first undisputed papal canonisation, of Ulrich of Augsburg, came only in 993.

Which fictional saint do Finnish Americans celebrate on 16 March, the day before Patrick's feast?

Urho: St. Urho was invented in Minnesota in 1956 and supposedly drove the grasshoppers out of Finland; his colours are royal purple and Nile green, and Menahga has a statue of him.

Judy Garland sang 'It's a Great Day for the Irish' in which 1940 MGM film?

Little Nellie Kelly: the number recreates New York's Fifth Avenue parade on the MGM backlot, and the film contains Garland's only on-screen death scene, as the mother Nellie.

Which song did Chris Hadfield record himself singing aboard the ISS for St Patrick's Day 2013?

Danny Boy: Hadfield also posted photos of Ireland from orbit and of himself in green; the song's lyrics were written in 1910 by Frederic Weatherly, an English lawyer, and set to the Londonderry Air in 1913.

Arthur Guinness's 1759 lease on the St James's Gate brewery ran for how many years?

9,000: the rent was fixed at £45 a year, though the famous lease no longer runs, because the company later bought the site outright.

Which English horse-racing meeting usually falls in the same week as St Patrick's Day and draws crowds of Irish visitors?

Cheltenham Festival: its four days of jump racing each March usually take in the holiday, Irish racegoers travel over in their thousands, and the crowd greets the first race with the 'Cheltenham roar'.

Before the 1900s, Ireland's solitary shoemaker fairy was usually said to wear which colour?

Red: in the old tales solitary fairies wore red and only the sociable trooping fairies wore green; Samuel Lover in 1831 gave him a red square-cut coat laced with gold.

Which airline's air traffic control call sign is 'SHAMROCK'?

Aer Lingus: its aircraft answer to 'Shamrock' on air traffic control radio, and Ireland has registered the plant as a trademark, winning a German Supreme Court appeal over it in 1985.

On St Patrick's Day 2018 Ireland beat England 24–15 to seal a Grand Slam at which ground?

Twickenham: winning at England's own ground sealed only the third Grand Slam in Ireland's history and ended the hosts' six-year unbeaten run there in the Six Nations.

In 1940 St Patrick's Day was officially moved to 3 April so it would not clash with what?

Palm Sunday: 17 March 1940 fell on Palm Sunday, so the feast moved to 3 April; it shifted again in 2008, to 15 March, to stay out of Holy Week, a clash that will not recur until 2160.

A 1995 US Supreme Court ruling let Boston's parade organisers exclude whom?

LGBTQ groups: the justices ruled unanimously in Hurley that a parade is its organisers' own speech, so the state could not make them include a gay, lesbian and bisexual Irish group.