Time until St Patrick's Day

St Patrick's Day is 17 March, the traditional death date of the patron saint of Ireland. It is a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and where the 17th falls on a weekend the Irish day off moves to the following Monday. Elsewhere it is an unofficial celebration, most visibly in cities with large Irish diaspora populations. The date is fixed, so this countdown simply rolls to next year once the 17th has gone past.

Parades are the fixed points of the day, and many are held in daylight on whichever date suits the organisers, so a city parade may run on the weekend either side of the 17th rather than on it. Dublin builds a multi-day festival around its parade, and beds in the city that week are booked months ahead. Several American cities hold their parade in early March for reasons of weather and tradition, which regularly confuses visitors. The day falls during Lent, and the Catholic church in Ireland has occasionally moved the feast when 17 March collided with Holy Week, which is the one thing that shifts the religious observance off the date. Pubs in the Republic were closed by law on the day until the 1960s.

Outside the island of Ireland the day is a public holiday only in Montserrat, where it also commemorates a slave rebellion planned for 17 March 1768, and in Newfoundland and Labrador, where provincial government offices take the nearest Monday off. Buenos Aires holds one of the largest celebrations in South America, and Tokyo has run a parade along Omotesando for decades. What people get wrong is what the date marks: it is the traditional anniversary of Patrick's death rather than his birth or any national founding, and Ireland commemorates the 1916 Rising at Easter instead. Patrick was born in Roman Britain, so the day belongs to a mission rather than to a birthplace.

The next one falls on Wednesday, 17 March 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Patrick was a Romano-British teenager taken to Ireland by raiders, who escaped and came back years later as a missionary. The only reliable sources for him are two short pieces he wrote himself, the Confessio and a letter denouncing a warlord called Coroticus, and neither mentions snakes or shamrocks. Ireland had no snakes to expel, having been cut off from Britain before they could return after the ice. The shamrock explanation of the Trinity turns up in print in the eighteenth century, more than a thousand years after him.

The parade is American before it is Irish. Marches by Irish soldiers and emigrant societies are recorded in New York and Boston in the eighteenth century, while Dublin held no official state parade until 1931. Green is a late arrival too: the colour long associated with Patrick was a particular blue, still called St Patrick's blue, and green took over with the nationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The habit of dyeing a river or floodlighting a building came back to Ireland from the diaspora rather than the other way about.