But civilization is not a people. It’s not a race. It’s a process. A refinement from tribal hatreds and primitive fears to common bonds. Certainly, much of American civilization was built on the backs of human property. The war fought over that original sin, and the hundred years of struggle afterward to grant full citizenship to the formerly enslaved, is the process — that upward arc that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about.

Count me as a proud Celt, and a Europhile, a lover of everything from tiny French villages to the Gothic vastness of a thousand-year-old cathedral to the ruins of Greek theaters on Sicilian slopes. Of course, that same Europe gave us religious wars that killed three million in the 16th century, and up to eight million in the 17th. And what savagery from any other civilization can match the Holocaust, the slaughter of six million Jews by the blue-eyed and the blond?

The Irish were once hailed for saving civilization, after monks and scribes maintained the rich record of Greek, Latin and Christian writers that was being destroyed elsewhere in Europe. By the time they’d clustered, poor and unwanted on American shores, a prominent writer, George C. Foster, said their New York community was “the very rotting skeleton of city civilization.”

The Mexicans and refugees from Muslim countries targeted by Trump commit fewer crimes than Americans born here, and certainly fewer as a percentage than the immigrant Irish did. Imagine what Sean Hannity would say if Mexicans burned down much of New York City, as the Irish did in 1863, in what may have been the bloodiest riot in American history.

Those four days of carnage, spurred in part by the disproportionate number of Irish drafted to fight in the Civil War, was a spasm of racial hatred and mob violence at its worse. Blacks were hanged. Pro-Union Irish who tried to stop the rioters were pummeled. The New York Times used a Gatling gun to defend its headquarters.

This horrid episode was followed, just a few years later, by the Fenian Brotherhood raids into what was known as British North America. Their song was a call to arms:

“And we’ll go and capture Canada,

For we’ve nothing else to do.”

No ethnic group, and very few religions, are immune from violent madness. The Sunni versus Shiite savagery in so much of the world today was preceded by all the bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics in Europe.

We raise a glass on the saint’s holiday for that part of civilization saved by the Irish, that part of civilization enriched by the Irish and that part of the Irish story that shows a path of redemption after no small amount of crimes.