Five years ago, the government proposed a new public holiday to mark the heroism of frontline workers during Covid, and to remember those who died during the pandemic. This was a welcome symbol of national grief, dedication, and resilience.
Instead, the idea morphed into a once-off public holiday in 2022 dedicated to the Covid workers, turning into an ongoing public holiday from 2023 dedicated to Saint Brigid and the Pagan Spring celebration of Imbolc which is associated with the earlier Pagan goddess Brigit.
There was no need to bring religion into this commemoration, never mind allow religion to hijack it. When the healthcare workers were protecting us from Covid, nobody was applauding Saint Brigid or the goddess Brigit. We were applauding the dedication and selflessness of human healthcare professionals.
Saint Brigid has a potent symbolism in Irish culture, which is Christian evangelism. She supposedly wove a Christian cross out of rushes to convert a Pagan chieftain into Christianity as he was dying. That is exactly the wrong message to convey about the Ireland of today.
This Christian conversion myth is particularly ironic in the context of the most recent Irish marriage figures. Four in ten Irish marriages are now secular. This is twice as many as twenty years ago. Just over a third of Irish marriages are now Christian. This is down from a massive eighty percent twenty years ago.
Most significantly, almost a quarter of Irish marriages are now some variation of Spiritualist, Pagan, or Celtic. This is up from zero twenty years ago. If this trend continues, it could overtake Christian marriages, and be the second most popular type behind secular.
Some supporters of the new holiday argue that Saint Brigid is female, and balances the male Saint Patrick’s Day. But adding a new saint does not balance an existing saint. It just reinforces the anachronistic idea that we all identify with mythological saints that are already over-represented on our calendar.
Remember, the government first proposed this as a public holiday to recognise frontline health workers. If they wanted to also celebrate a woman, they could have chosen, for example, Dublin physician Dorothy Stopford Price (1890-1954), a pioneer of the BCG vaccine that was central to the elimination of childhood Tuberculosis in Ireland.
Instead we have yet another religious holiday, around which state-funded schools teach children to make Saint Brigid’s crosses and bring them home to their families. But if state-funded schools forced even one Christian child to make an atheist symbol and bring it home, we would never hear the end of it.
This assists the overt mission of the Catholic church, as described by Pope Francis: “It is imperative to evangelise cultures in order to inculturate the Gospel.” It’s like our parliamentarians starting each day praying to the Christian God, and the free advert that RTE gives to the Catholic church each day in the form of the Angelus.
Ending this religious background noise is not as important as achieving secular education or removing the religious oath for President, Taoiseach, and Judges. But it remains on the agenda as something that needs to be changed to reflect the pluralist Ireland that we now inhabit.