Happy St Patrick’s Day for Sunday, 17 March  to all Irish cats and cats of Ireland , all 355,00 of you.  

This Feast Day for the patron saint is celebrated all over Ireland and Northern Ireland, and indeed anywhere an Irish person, or anybody with an Irish grandmother, or who just feels Irish, happens to be. 

It is a grand excuse for a party or a parade. In Chicago, USA, they are busy dyeing the city’s river emerald green (Ireland’s national colour) in readiness. Belvedere is ready right now – he tells me that one of his great-great-great-great grandmothers was from Kilkenny. He has not dyed himself green this year, but it has been known.

St Patrick wasn’t actually Irish, or indeed a saint (he was never officially canonised) and neither did he banish snakes from Ireland  as they weren’t there anyway. None of that matters.  He is wrapped in impregnable charisma. 

He was born in 5th-century Roman Britain. When he was 16, he was captured by Irish pirates, and taken to Ireland as a slave. After six years labouring as a shepherd, he escaped back to England and his family, but returned later to in full evangelistic mode and converted the nation from pagan to Christian.  

What about the cats? 

Nothing is known about Patrick and cats BUT the great news is that Ireland is an excellent  place for black cats, who are considered extremely lucky (unlike the poor gatti neri of Italy, see blog Italian Black Cat day post Friday 17 November).  This is down to the legendary Black Bog Cat, a smart, fast and alarmingly robust feline who, legend has it, prowls the shores of Lough Neagh, west of Belfast in Northern Ireland., and brings good fortune and happiness to any soul lucky enough to meet it. For a mythical beast, it has a  very efficient marketing team, as Lucky Black Bog Cat merchandise  is available all over Ireland (This is what Belvedere opines, I detect slight professional sniffiness). 

A Poem

In homage to Belvedere’s great-great-great-great  grandmother from  Kilkenny,  we offer the famous Kilkenny Cat poem.

There once were two cats from Kilkenny,

Each thought there was one cat too many,

So they fought and they fit.

And the scratched and they bit,

Till, excepting their nails

And the tips of their tails, 

Instead of two cats, there weren’t any.

This is almost a limerick  (it has an extra two lines, 5 and 6) , named after County Limerick,  in the south west of Ireland, where to my disappointment, everybody does NOT speak all the time in anapaestic tetrameters with a rhyme scheme of AABBA. The cats are from Kilkenny, one county away to the east.  St Patrick lived and worked mainly in County Down, in Northern Ireland.  So we have the whole Irish/ cat thing well covered.