St. Patrick: hero, or the world's foremost snake murderer

irishbegrudger

(taken from www.rant.ie)

I’ve never cared for the Welsh. Examine one (from a safe distance, using tongs). Note how it never blinks? See how it exhales twice for every inhale? And notice how the male secretes pheromonal spores from glands behind its ears when a quarter mile or less from anything female or edible?

Anatomy aside, Welsh contribution to the world has not justified their continued immunity from extermination. In 1784, the renowned inventor Alwyn Jones attempted to devise a steam-based apparatus for violently masturbating himself, but instead accidentally invented Whooping Cough (which continues to kill 600,000 people annually). “I screwed up,” Alwyn famously uttered, moments before he was compelled to choke himself to death in accordance with Welsh law.

It is also known that the hitherto peaceful, Jew-loving vegan Adolf Hitler was radicalised on a visit to Wales in 1937. Nobody knows quiet what the Feurer saw in his forty minutes in Cardiff, but he returned to Berlin and blueprinted the annihilation of Europe that very afternoon.

Mussolini, Franco, Pol Pot, Stalin, Shakin Stephens: all honour students before excursions to Swansea. With the exception of Shakin Stephens, all went on to dabble in genocide (with varying degrees of success).

But I’ll allow the Welsh a single positive amidst their steady conveyor belt of horrors. In 387 AD, they gifted us Dafydd Jenkins (or St. Patrick, as we’d forcibly re-brand him). To understand the significance of this donation, one has to visualise an ancient, bloodier Ireland; a nightmarish Ireland; an Ireland overrun with snakes (the docudrama ‘Snakes on a Plane’, whilst historically inaccurate, would certainly give a flavour for the magnitude of the problem).

Walk a mile in the shoes of a humble lasagne farmer in Connemara, 386 AD. You’ve been working the fields all day. The pasta is growing ripe and tall, the mince is almost ready for plucking, and the cheese plants are sagging with bounty. You set for home, drooling in reverie of the five gallon drum of moonshine that awaits you. Soon you’ll be caked in vomit, freed from the responsibility of bowel-control, and blissfully comatose.

But as you reach the homestead, you find your wife Vera crushed within the coils of a thirty-foot Boa Constrictor. The serpent has already swallowed her to the pelvis, and is inching toward her abdomen. Vera’s always been a drama queen, and you immediately suspect work-shyness to be a factor.

“What’s all this then, Vera?” you ask, irritated by her gurgling. “Come on now, pull yourself together and put the tea on, there’s a good woman.”

You realise something is seriously wrong when neither you nor she can uncoil the serpent. Thinking fast, you bring her darning kit close, and with her free arm, she dutifully applies stitches and buttons to your ragged britches. A blow-job and a warm handshake later, you drag her into the barn by her snake, where she can finish being eaten without making a spectacle of herself in front of the neighbours. It is quite literally the least you can do.

Heart wrenching, isn’t it? Hard to believe this was a common tale in the Ireland of yore. Until a hero came. It is said that when St. Patrick arrived in Dublin — which like much of Ireland, had still not gained its independence from Leitrim — he knelt before God and asked, “What’s with all the snakes? Is anybody on that?”

But neither God nor the people were ‘on that’. Irishmen had come to accept their place beneath snakes and sabre-toothed cows (whom would lose their fangs to evolution over time) in the food chain. Some folk even kept snakes as pets, and were unsurprisingly killed and eaten by the snakes in 100% of such cases. It is written that the cows and snakes grew to collude against the Irish, hunting in tandem. So complacent did hunter and prey become that, reminiscent of the dodo, an Irishman would allow himself to be eaten rather than attempt to flee a cow or snake.

St. Patrick was appalled by this, and wielded his ordained power to banish all serpents into the seas surrounding Ireland. In landlocked counties, he simply commanded them to slither out in front of oncoming horse and carts. Remember, this was a time when priests still boasted supernatural powers (e.g. all priests could rotate their heads owl-like in a 360 degree fashion, and bishops could run at over 120 mph).

When God learned of the snake genocide, he did speak unto St. Patrick.

“What the f*ck? My snakes?” said God.
“My Lord, the serpents have been a plague unto the noble Irish.”
“Noble Irish? I only put those saps here to feed my snakes,” said God.
“Really? Oh. Well, this is awkward,” said St. Patrick.
“I’ll awkward you. I hereby appoint you the patron saint of Gargyle. Half the world will poison themselves with booze in your name every year. That’s your legacy.”
“Fair enough,” said St. Patrick.
“And I’m taking a testicle too. Yoink!”
“What the?”

And lo, their troubles over, the snake-free utopia of Ireland did flourish for all eternity. Another hardship, they never faced. Except famine, colonisation, civil war, sectarianism and recession.

The End.

dublinario

St. Patrick was Welsh? Do the Welsh know?