It doesn't help that Irish is deader than Romero villains. It's more useful to learn Latin because at least some important books were written in that. Gaeilge sounds like a drunken Klingon coughing up a hairball, and if you want to be Irish and unintelligible we sell far better products.

4 Thank St. Patrick For Anything

March 17 is the first example of national Stockholm Syndrome. The Irish celebrate an Englishman taking our entire culture hostage and shooting it full of Catholicism. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders -- the first and only time Ireland has ever been on the traveling side of "Go to an island and fuck things up for people" equation -- and literally holy crap did that not work out for us. Patrick escaped, returned to England and spent years training for his revenge. Because he was born before automatic weapons or bat-costumes were invented, he returned armed with the power of religion, and did far more damage. For which I would personally like to thank him. A culture conditioned by over a millennium of Catholic guilt to think of sex and masturbation as sins is a great place to go through puberty, asshole.

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We must hide our deviant shame from God!

A near-terminal case of not separating church from state is why trilobites still have more progressive sexual health laws than us. The government's attitude to reproductive rights is "The more the merrier, and instead of rights we mean unwanted pregnancies!" St. Patrick is also credited with driving the snakes out of Ireland, which is like driving the velociraptors out of a basketball court -- pretty easy since there weren't any, and if there had been you just made things way less kickass. Removing an entire ecological sub-order makes him the first Eco-terrorist. In fact, yanking out entire chunks of the ecosystem usually results in unexpected disasters. Let's see, removing snakes would make Ireland incredibly vulnerable to anything coming from small rodents, like rats. Oh, son of a