For the fourth consecutive year, Dublin City Council has unveiled its pagan goddess-themed celebrations for the day the country has traditionally celebrated for centuries as St Brigid’s Day – and the beloved saint has been conveniently airbrushed out of the mission statement and mostly out of the whole shebang.
Lest anyone be unclear about their intentions, or think us Catholics are imagining things, here’s what Dublin City Council tell us what they are doing with our taxes: hosting a festival to “celebrate Imbolc and honour the legacy of Brigit, the Celtic goddess of inspiration, healing, wisdom, and creativity”. They even have a witchy-looking teal green and black promo poster advertises “Brigit – Dublin City Celebrating Women” brought to you by Dublin City Council and RTE, Supporting the arts. In other words, brought to you by your taxes but on their super-woke terms.
The well-funded but tiresome effort to reshape a Christian feast day feels as if its been reshaped by establishment feminists and strident atheists: so its less about the enduring traditions of St Brigid’s Day and more about the State-funded erasure of Ireland’s female patron Saint, and the pretence that, all along, we were celebrating the mythical goddess Brigit.
There are also t-shirts and sweatshirts designed by clothing company Jill and Gill which brings to us a specially designed Brigit Icon collection “which honours the legacy of the Celtic Goddess of Brigit.” Dublin City Council encourages people to “wear your support and be part of the movement!” There is of course a whiff of religious worship about the whole thing. We want to unbound ourselves from religion, and yet, the advertising repeatedly talks about being in a movement, and mentions healing and renewal and light. There’s some waffle about the piercing of the “veil between this world and the mythical underworld.”
Akin to St. Patrick’s Day, it’s sad to see that St. Brigid’s Day has also fallen prey to commercialisation and transparent opportunism – but it almost seems worse. We don’t normally try and remodel St Patrick into someone else. Yes, he is used as an excuse for excessive drinking and paddy-whackey, but many still go to Mass, wear green, and don the traditional shamrock. St Brigid’s Day has been turned into something else entirely. It has been comandeered as a day to worship wokism, turn up the notch on political opportunism, and embrace fully-fledged paganism.
The all-out embrace of pseudo-history means that the Christian Saint has been almost totally excluded, which is just tasteless. She has been airbrushed out of the DCC version of history – a council given significant sums of our money to do something to mark what has always been a predominantly Christian feast. It is ironic that the festivities are catered towards the kinds of women who would probably declare that they have been so oppressed by religion, yet are now so allured by paganism.
I sifted through pages of content relating to the festival, and could find very little mention of the actual woman of the hour: Often her name is mis-spelled – St Brigit – and the Catholic saint and the pagan goddess are often morphed together into some sort of muddled, virtue-signalling, half-truth.
Take for example the absolute bullshit, if you’ll excuse my language, of this PR blurb for one of DCC’s workshops: “Brigid’s crosses and Brídeog dolls are made to celebrate St. Brigid’s feast day and the pagan festival of Imbolc, welcoming in the light of Spring.”
Except that’s just not true. Both the familiar cross and the Brídeog doll were made to honour St Brigid, as everyone with any knowledge of Irish customs and folklore knows. As one site explained regarding the customs practised on Inis Meáin:
There is a very old custom or ritual, which has been practised in the island for centuries. On the eve of the feast of St Brigid, January 31st, all the young girls (under twelve) visited every house in the island with a Brídeog, a doll made of straw and clothed in a bright dress, ribbons and some jewellery. When they arrived in each house they recited a little verse while dancing to the rhythm, basically a prayer wishing the blessing of Brigid on the household in the coming year.
Crios, crios
Bríd í mo chrios
Muire ‘s a Mac
Bríd is a brat
Má’s fearr atá sibh anocht,
Go mba seacht bhfearr a bheidh sibh
Bliain ó anocht
The prayer refers to Crios Bríde, a plaited straw belt often with incorporated straw crosses. The inhabitants of each home passed through the circle of the belt while reciting a prayer to St Brigid in the hope of gaining the saint’s protection from illness during the coming year”. The prayer invokes Mary with her Son, Bríd with her cloak, and asks that the health of the faithful might improve seven fold by the next St Brigid’s day.
Even a limited perusal of the histography of St Brigid will show that the old customs – the cross, the brídeog, Brat Bríde (where a piece of fabric or ribbon is left outside on the eve of Brigid’s Day so that the saint will bless it in her passing and it would thereby possess healing and protection for humans and animals), visits to holy wells – were all associated with the Christian saint, who was a real person, and a strong, independent, powerful woman long before that it became a glib phrase.
Instead of celebrating her prowess, and St Brigid’s courage, intellect and compassion, we’re patronised with all kinds of drippy, hippy nonsense that blatantly ignores the saint we all once knew and admired.
So we get, in a series of events that mostly lazily borrows Christian language while refusing to maintain any authentic spirit of St Brigid of Kildare, things like a “unique cycle pilgrimage to the hidden Brigit’s Well in Phoenix Park.” Led by Dr Karen Ward, an Irish Celtic Shamanic Energy Therapist, it invites cyclists will take part in a “special Cleansing Ceremony,” using the water in the Well to “refresh and renew” themselves.
Right.
Some of the events seem great – the Armagh Rhymers, supporting women in business – but DCC’s petty, anti-the-real-Brigid, attitude even extends to what will likely be their biggest event, the “stunning light projections in celebration of Brigit, goddess of inspiration and renewal”.
How small-minded is that? They couldn’t celebrate the saint too? It’s the opposite of inclusion. In fact, the whole tax-payer shindig screams ‘feck off, Christian women, we’ll take your money but you’ll not be included’. If there was only a way of getting a tax credit against our PAYE so that we could claim ‘no taxation without representation’ for the whole farcical thing.
In fact, Dublin City Council seems to have seized on the chance to diss Christianity. There is an amnesia about the whole thing. A rewriting of basic truth. Forget the fact that the Christian church has been a key inspiration for art and culture and philosophy, because we want to bang the drum that says Christianity has been mean to women. The tax-payer extravaganza is great for pink-haired feminists, but not so great for families. And I can’t in a million years see any of the men I know wanting to take part.
In the last census in 2022, 3.5 million people in Ireland identified as Catholic (69 per cent compared to a far smaller 14 per cent who said they had ‘no religion’). This compares to the 3,809 people in the entire country who said they were Pagans or Pantheists. So why on earth has St Brigid been blotted out so we can celebrate the pagan goddess instead?
On behalf of Gript readers (and myself) I asked Dublin City Council these questions. They told me that they had chosen “Brigit” the goddess because they had “a desire to honour her as a symbol of empowerment for women today” – “in doing so, we aim to emphasise her ancient mythology and her relevance as a symbol of inspiration.”
“While the programme may place greater emphasis on Brigit’s pre-Christian roots, it is by no means an exclusion of her Christian significance. Instead, it’s a celebration of her multiple identities, both as a goddess and as the patron saint of Ireland. The diversity of Brigit’s legacy is precisely what makes her such a powerful figure,” they told me.
Well, I don’t buy that. The whole thing is detached from our Christian history, and we should have some clear answers on why exactly that is being done. It’s clearly a snub, in a way that invites exclusion, of Christian women – or to all people who know when they are being gaslight and know damn well that, until 5 minutes ago, February 1st was the feast of a much beloved and honoured Christian saint.
And it’s definitely not empowering. It’s actually a bit infantile to women. Does anyone really believe we need four days of this nonsense to prove that we are ‘empowered’? Do we really have to gleefully throw religion under the bus to be better women? For what it’s worth, I think that if the Council wanted to be original, it would get onboard with the Christian revival that is underway.
Never have we witnessed more celebrities and public figures converting to Christianity. The signs of revival are all around us. Ascension’s Bible in a Year podcast presented by a Catholic priest topped the charts last year, followed by Joe Rogan, who has added to his audience by talking about the value of the Christian faith. We are wrestling for meaning. Christianity, dare I say it, is becoming popular again.
Dublin City Council should stop the Stalin-era-level of airbrushing – and realise it could attract more people to its events this February it was genuinely inclusive, and included Christians on St Brigid’s Day. What’s on offer at present is so annoyingly patronising, twee, and corny that it would wear the patience of a saint.