Today in Ireland is the official Saint Brigid's Day holiday as former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was only too pleased to remind us in a tweet made here on January 30, 2026:
I signed the order establishing this new public holiday. It clearly states that it is both St Brigid's Day and Imbolc venerating both an Irish christian saint and our own ancient new year when we had our own gods and godesses (sic). National identity doesn't have to be monotone or singular. It can be multi-layered and pluralistic. In fact, that's more authentic to who we are and who she was as a saint godess (sic). Éire ildaite.
This extraordinary statement perfectly illustrates the culture war around Saint Brigid which seems to have taken on a sharper edge this year. I first started blogging back in 2009 and am conscious of a real sea-change of late. Back then the notion that Saint Brigid was really a Celtic goddess whom the Church had hijacked was confidently asserted as established and unquestioned fact. It wasn't until I started to investigate the evidence on which these claims rested for myself that I realised just how dubious the foundations actually were. I have been aware over the last few years that female academics have begun to challenge the goddess, I even heard one say in a radio interview that we had been 'sold a pup' about Saint Brigid's supposed identification with a goddess. Yet Mr Varadkar seems to be totally unaware of the recent advances made in the understanding of early medieval Christianity and of the re-examination of the historical saint Brigid, instead claiming that the 'saint goddess' is the more authentic. I find it interesting that 'progressive' people, supposedly wanting female voices to be heard and taken seriously, prefer to ignore the scholarship of modern Irish women academics and instead cling to discredited Victorian thinking about goddesses.
The idea though that Saint Brigid deserved a public holiday in her honour predates our modern culture wars. Indeed, it was something writer Alice Curtayne was aware of in the early 1930s. In her article 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', published in the Irish Monthly she wrote of the various ways in which interest in our national patroness had been reawakened:
..in recent years there has been a curiously spontaneous revival of the cult of Saint Brigid. I do not say that Ireland had forgotten her, but we were very ignorant of her and very unconcerned about out ignorance. Then it was as though our national consciousness became suddenly uneasy. Articles, poems, plays and even books about Brigid began to blossom out here and there.She was painted by two of our artists and their different conceptions provoked a welcome discussion. Her relic was solemnly brought back from Portugal and enshrined in a church dedicated to her near the capital city. The demand arose on all sides to have her feast-day declared a national holiday, like that of Saint Patrick.
Alice Curtayne, 'The Rediscovery of Saint Brigid', The Irish Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 745 (Jul., 1935), pp. 412-420. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513775
How sad to see that now that this demand has finally been met, it is to honour a quite different 'Brigid' than the historical saint, loved and venerated by the Irish people over many centuries.
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