St Patrick's Day Resources

With the big day coming up on Wednesday I thought a few links to some resources for St Patrick's Day wouldn't go amiss. And not a green pint among them.

For general resources, if you can avert your eyes from the video of corned beef and cabbage (a video? Does anyone actually eat corned beef?) the History channel's website is a good place to look for videos on celebrations around the world.

Some interesting articles on the life of St Patrick are "Will the Real St Patrick Please Stand Up?", detailed information on his life and teaching, information on the Bell of St Patrick. The ever helpful BBC website has a dedicated page with good graphics. The Confession of St Patrick is available in English online and the UCC website has both the Confessions and letters online on its excellent CELT site.

For Children:

The "Give up yer old sins" retelling of the story of St Patrick by children is the Rutland primary school with accompanying animation is great fun to listen to. There is a wealth of cut-out shamrocks and the like on the web, some of the best resource sites I've found are The Teacher's Guide with lesson plans and a short play, Irish language resources (we need more!) and some songs and music. It's hard to avoid the leprechaun element of these things but this site embraces the idea with the least amount of tackiness.

Prayers and Hymns:
There are lots of prayers associated with our Patron saint, the most well known of which is St Patrick's Breastplate. Beliefnet incorporates this into a beautiful guided meditation. My guilty pleasure is belting out (loudness over tunefulness) the hymn "Hail Glorious St Patrick" at Mass on St Patrick's Day-these three seem to do it better though:


Other Celebrations:

The official website of the St Patrick's Day Festival covering events all over Ireland provides information and timetables for everything from the céilí at St Stephen's Green on Tuesday night to the BIG EVENT of the parade on Wednesday morning. I'll be watching the parade on TV admittedly (with a nice cuppa) saving my energy and body heat for my patriotic display in Croke Park where I'll be watching the AIB GAA Hurling and Football All Ireland Senior Club Championships with a special interest in the seeing the Ballyhale Shamrocks triumph.