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St Patrick's punishment

Kilian Doyle takes a wry look at how St Patrick would fare if he were to return to Ireland today.

It's a quiet January afternoon in O'Hooligan's Irish pub in Heaven. There's a rambunctious character sitting at a table surrounded by cronies doling out free pints to him. He's singing and yelling and generally holding court.

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Quietly, a small, wizened old geezer wearing a leather biker jacket and a faded Iggy Pop T-shirt walks into the pub and ambles over to the table. The place falls silent.

"Patrick?"

"Oh, flip." (He's been waiting for this. Fixes best smile and turns around, expecting the worst.) "Yes, God?"

"I've been thinking. You've been up here for over a thousand years, faffing about and annoying everyone with that bloody story about the snakes. I swear, if I hear it once more, you're getting reincarnated as a dung beetle."

"B-b-b-but ."

"Shsssht you. I'm the Daddy around here. There's no talking when I'm talking, fella. And as for your behaviour last St Patrick's Day when you ran into the nuns' complex butt naked and screaming about Bishop's rights after drinking those fifteen pints of ambrosia you'd dyed green..."

"Erm, I know, I'm sorry about that."

"What did I tell you about talking when I'm talking, you loathsome toad? I've had quite enough of you. I've decided as punishment to send you back to Ireland. I reckon they need a gee-up in the Christianity department."

"But I was a slave last time I was there. It sucked, big time. They don't have slaves there any more, do they?"
"Don't you worry about that Patrick. I know a man who knows a man who's the foreman on a building site. It'll be just like the old days. Especially when you get your paycheck."
"What, no expense account?"
"That's exactly the kind of attitude that is bugging me, you cretin. I'm fed up of all this rampant materialism and heathen self-interest. I want you to go down to Earth and show the Irish the error of their ways. I've got your cover all worked out. You'll be pretending to be a Polish engineering graduate."
"Ah, God, please don't do this to me, they'll eat me alive. I'll be good from now on, I promise, I'm off the booze and there'll be nary a word about the snakes . . ."
And so it came to pass.

Saint Patrick arrives in Dublin Airport early one Sunday morning with nothing but €500 in cash and the name of a foreman on a site in west Dublin that God scribbled onto the back of a cigarette packet. (He tried to sneak his Bishop's robes out of Heaven but God busted him and forced him to wear a woollen tank-top and a really, really tight pair of cords instead.)

The rucksack full of hopes and dreams he'd checked in at Warsaw had been sent to Dubai in a baggage-handling mix-up. The lost property woman said it'd be sent to his address when it was eventually located. He was trying to explain that he didn't have an address when she shooed him away and slammed down the shutters muttering something about it being time for Eastenders.

Bewildered, he wanders off.

"Need a minicab, bud?" a bumfluffed youth inquires of him outside.

"Ah, yes, that I do. I need to go here," Patrick says, handing the little thug the cigarette packet.

"Deadly buzz, man, dat's near my gaff. C'mon, here's me motor."

Patrick hops into the back of the 15-year-old Toyota. It smells like O'Hooligan's on a Sunday morning.

"So, wha's yer name, pal?" asks the driver. "Patrick? From Poland? Jaysus you'll be right at home here. Yer going to love it. We'll look after ye, so we will."

An hour and a half later, Patrick comes to in an alleyway in Clondalkin. He remembers very little. The driver gave him a small white mint sweet that didn't taste like mint at all. Then nothing, other than a vague recollection of being dragged out of the car. Checks his pockets. The €500 is gone.

"Nice one, God," says he. "Thanks a lot. You're one funny dude."

Dusts himself off. "This won't beat me," he mutters to nobody in particular. "Sure, didn't I once spend 40 days wandering barefoot around that bloody mountain in Mayo? That's the last time I'll ever do magic mushrooms, mind you."

Sees a church. In he goes. It's empty apart from a miserable looking priest with terminal dandruff and a bulbous red nose. He looks as lonely as a pig at a Bar Mitzvah.

"Where is everyone?" asks Patrick.

"Ah, sure they've better things to be doing. Aren't the post-Christmas sales on? They've a new God now. No use for me anymore."

"So where do they worship?"

"In the shops, man. What stone did you crawl out from under? Ah here, I meant no offence, come back, will you? Please?"

But Patrick is gone. God was right, he reckons, this is terrible. All his hard work converting this shower of ungrateful pagans has gone up in a puff of cut-price garden furniture and Manolo Blahniks. He walks to Dundrum Shopping Centre. He's got work to do.

When he gets there, he is flummoxed. It's so big, where to start? In desperation, he just starts shouting his head off. "The wages of sin is death! Repent, pagans. I am Patrick, returned to save you!"

He lasts all of 30 seconds before being ejected by three burly security guards. "Sorry, pal. There's no God in here," says one, aiming a rabbit punch to the Saint's left kidney as if to emphasise a point.

Undeterred, Patrick spies the Luas bridge. "I'll beckon the faithful from there. They will come to hear me speak the Word from miles."

Gathering a few armfuls of leftover freesheet newspapers, he lights a beacon on the bridge.

Eight weeks later, after being freed from Mountjoy Prison where he's been serving a brief but tough sentence for arson, a disillusioned Patrick finds himself on O'Connell Street in the middle of the St Patrick's Day parade.

"This is more like it!" says he, shrugging off the memories of sharing a cell with a chap who insisted he was Pope John XVII's mother.

But it soon dawns on him this celebration has nothing to do with Christianity at all. The gangs of teenagers around him seem more intent on getting hammered on green booze and ogling half-naked Texan cheerleaders.

"It's now or never," he says to himself, stripping off his prison-issue overalls to reveal the Bishop's robe he spent his time inside making out of old pillowcases. The arrows look a bit incongruous, but he doesn't care. He runs up O'Connell Street, ranting loudly about heresy and setting fire to floats with a blowtorch he's grabbed from a dreadlocked Brazilian juggler.

The Saintly mission is cut short by a tackle from a 19-year-old Bangarda from Roscommon. (She will subsequently go on to be interviewed on the Ryan Tubridy television programme and enjoy brief fame and a few dates with an actor from Fair City before descending into a self-destructive maelstrom of comfort eating and shed-collecting once the gravity of her intervention is explained to her in a dream by the ghost of Padre Pio.)

Patrick is brought to the Bridewell, where he spends 15 hours on a wooden bench handcuffed to a man caught in an alley off Moore Street in flagrante with a blow-up doll of Osama Bin Laden before being told he is to be deported on the next flight out.

Next morning, as he trundles dejectedly past the lost property desk in the airport, he hears a roar. "Here, you, we got your bag!" The sultry wagon has recognised him. She flings the tattered rucksack over the counter.

It's empty. Someone's nicked the hopes and dreams out of it. "Sod this," says he, casting a last, despairing glance at Ireland. "You're on your own."

Kilian Doyle


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