On Translation, and Ireland, This St Patrick’s Day

St Patrick’s Day has never quite sat easily with me.

Not because I dislike it—there’s something undeniably warm about it—but because it seems to ask very little of us. It offers a version of Ireland that is easy to recognise and even easier to repeat: colour, noise, familiarity. A kind of cultural shorthand. And yet, the longer I sit with it, the more I feel that what matters about Ireland is rarely what is most visible.

In my spare time, I’ve been studying Gaelic literature—slowly, and not always successfully. Today, of all days, I found myself reading scholarly articles on the role of religious literature in Gaelic translation. It struck me that this, more than anything else, might be the quiet thread running through Irish history: not just language, but the movement of meaning across it.

I was born in Scotland and have lived in Ireland for most of my life. That has never felt like a contradiction, though perhaps it should. The histories of both places are more closely intertwined than we often acknowledge, not least through the shared inheritance of the Gaelic language and tradition, which moved between them long before modern ideas of nationhood took hold. Even St Patrick himself resists easy categorisation: while he has long been associated with Wales, more recent scholarship suggests that he may in fact have come from Strathclyde. And later figures such as Colum Cille—who left from what was my home city of Derry on his journey to Iona—reflect a world in which culture, language, and belief were not fixed within borders, but carried across them. The origins feel less settled than the traditions that followed.

Ireland has never simply inherited its culture intact. It has translated it—across languages, across belief systems, across entirely different ways of understanding the world. What survives is rarely what began, at least not in any pure sense.

The history of religious texts in Ireland makes that clear. These were not just transferred from Latin into Irish. They were interpreted, reshaped, adapted for audiences who lived in a different linguistic and cultural reality. What emerged was something new—not a copy, but a continuation. Meaning didn’t remain fixed; it was made to live again in another form.

There’s something in that which feels familiar.

The Irish language itself is often spoken about as something to be preserved, as though it were a fixed inheritance. But the Irish we have now is not something frozen in time. It is something lived in. It has been adjusted, negotiated, carried forward under pressure and change. It reflects not just where it came from, but what it has passed through.

And perhaps the same is true of Irish identity more broadly.

There is a tendency, particularly on a day like this, to look for something settled—a version of Ireland that feels clear, continuous, and self-contained. But the more I think about it, the less convincing that becomes. Ireland, like its language, has always been in motion. It has been shaped by reinterpretation, by compromise, by the need to make meaning work in new contexts.

In that sense, it has always been, at least in part, a translation.

Maybe that’s why the more familiar symbols feel insufficient. They capture something real, but not something complete. They don’t quite account for the effort involved in carrying meaning forward—the quiet, ongoing work of making something intelligible, again and again.

That’s what I find myself thinking about today.

Not celebration in the obvious sense, but continuity. The persistence of meaning, even as its form changes. The fact that what we recognise as Irish has not survived by remaining the same, but by constantly being re-expressed.

It’s a less visible idea. It doesn’t lend itself to spectacle.

But it feels closer to something true.