In the light of the city's fractured sense of identity, Belfast City Council has announced plans for 'politically correct' St Patrick's Day celebrations in 2006. But is there a 'historically correct' Patrick? Thomas O'Loughlin investigates.

Memory is our key both to the past and to our identity, and we are usually fairly certain about the overall architecture of the edifice known as 'our story'. Turning to Patrick - a crucial figure in Irish memory since the seventh century - memory's headlines run like this: a young British boy from a well-off clerical family was taken into slavery in Ireland; he later escaped; eventually became a bishop; and returned to Ireland as a missionary.

He so effectively preached the gospel that soon the whole island was Christian and he did the job so well that within a century Ireland was a powerhouse of faith with monasteries, scholars, and missionaries of her own. And, we know more about Patrick than any other fifth-century individual from these islands due to his two surviving letters: one is now known as his 'confession,' and the other a letter excommunicating the soldiers of the slaver Coroticus. These writings are seen as rugged witness to his simple holiness.

Patrick is, therefore, the father of Irish Christianity, the 'apostle of Ireland', the 'patron of the Irish', and the basis for the annual festival of Irishness on 17 March.

Different histories

But memory is always layered, the product of different moments reflection on the past and the remnants of various periods attitudes to what they saw as 'their past'. Fifty years ago most writers would have been happy to say Patrick came to Ireland in 432, converted Ireland in a great Easter-event on the Hill of Slane near the High King's residence, and that he founded the see of Armagh: both Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops claim to be the linear and direct successor of Patrick in that city.

Today, by contrast, such statements are carefully hedged because they are first mentioned in the later seventh century - at least 200 years after Patrick (and we can only guess at Patrick's dates by saying: 'in all probability sometime in the fifth century'). On the other extreme, the imagery surrounding St Patrick's Day is such a pastiche that often people in Ireland know the story but conclude 'that he probably never existed and it's all lies!' One generation's need for a meaningful story to explain their present is the next generation's embarrassment, yet bits from every period linger in the storehouse of images.

Untangling these layers is a fascinating human task - hence the fascination of Patrick, and hagiography in general, to a long succession of historians. This historical task is further complicated because of the special place that Christians give to studies of the past within their own apologetic agenda. For many denominations this untangling has a special place not just as curiosity about the past but also as a theological task by which they establish their relationship to what they see as their 'origins'. Often this religious agenda becomes confused with the task of the historian, or, as has often happened in the case of Patrick, is thought to be identical with historical research. The French historian Marc Bloch once wrote:

'Christianity is a religion of historians. Other religious systems have been able to found their beliefs and their rites on a mythology nearly outside human time. For sacred books, the Christians have books of history, and their liturgies commemorate, together with episodes from the terrestrial life of a God, the annals of the church and the lives of the saints.'