Why do people wear green on St. Patricks Day?
The colors of the Republic of Ireland are a tricolor of green, white, and orange. The orange supposedly represents the protestant population, the green the Catholic, and the white the peace between them. (Let’s just leave Northern Ireland out of this.) Protestants don’t celebrate Saint’s days. So the wearing of green is a symbol of Saint Patrick’s day and then Ireland, the Emerald Isle, in general. The day as a holiday with parades, green beer etc. is more of an American tradition than Irish, and of course on St. Paddy’s day everyone is Irish.
In a time of English rule over Ireland, people were not allowed to wear green because it represented the Irish Catholics. If you wore green or spoke Gaelic, you would be killed. Now Irish Catholics wear green in order to show their pride and compensate for a time when they were persecuted for wearing the color.
Wearing of the green originated when Irish Americans fought to obtain political status in the United States. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, most Irish immigrants in America were members of the Protestant middle class. When the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland in 1845, close to a million poor, uneducated, Catholic Irish began to pour into America to escape starvation. Despised for their religious beliefs and funny accents by the American Protestant majority, the immigrants had trouble finding even menial jobs. When Irish Americans in the country ‘s cities took to the streets on St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate their heritage, newspapers portrayed them in cartoons as drunk, violent monkeys. However, the Irish soon began to realize that their great numbers endowed them with a political power that had yet to be exploited. They started to organize, and their voting block, known as the “green machine,” became an important swing vote for political hopefuls. Suddenly, annual St. Patrick’s D
