irish lucky charm shamrock stone

This stone gets its luck from the shamrock engraved on it.

(JULIA HATMAKER/The Patriot-News)

Everyone likes to pretend they're Irish on St. Patrick's Day, but I like to pretend I'm Irish all year long. It's perhaps unsurprising, considering my given name (with the proper Gaelic spelling, mind you - none of that Anglicized "Shawn" business, thanks).

So, when a discussion arose at the PennLive office regarding the validity of the four-leaf clover as a symbol of Ireland, I was surprised to find myself making the same mistake that most people seem to make at this time of year.

To be brief: the four-leaf clover has nothing to do with Ireland or St. Patrick's Day.

The green leafy plant we ought to be associating with St. Patrick is, of course, the shamrock, which is specifically a sprig of the clover plant with three leaves, not four.

This photo is of a statue of St. Patrick in Ireland.

What's the difference? For one thing, the three-leaf clover was, according to legend, what St. Patrick used to explain the Holy Trinity of Christianity to the Irish people. Four leaves just doesn't add up.

For a more detailed explanation, I turned to Charles "Cholly" Shields, a local attorney and expert on Ireland who has

pointed out the difference between the four leaf clover and the shamrock.

More than just a symbol of St. Patrick, Shields says the shamrock became a

, just as the English use the rose, the Welsh use the leek and the Scottish the thistle.

Paraphrasing from the book "The Wearing of the Green, A History of St. Patrick's Day," Shields says that "the shamrock had a long pedigree in the Irish celebration of St. Patrick's Day and that for much of the nineteenth century, was seen by some in Ireland and Britain as a symbol of dissent and promoting Irish nationalism."

"They further observe," he continues, "that in the decades following the Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century, the shamrock had been popular among the Irish as an icon promoting, at least for a day, the rejection of British rule in Ireland."

Eventually, Shields concludes, "The shamrock was seen in Britain to be simply an emblem of Irishness that was accepted as a routine part of St. Patrick's Day. Of course, the tradition of wearing a shamrock has traveled 'across the pond' i.e., the Atlantic Ocean, and is a staple of celebrations here 'in the colonies.'"

So why the mix-up? Why have we embraced the false idol of the four leaf clover to represent all things Irish?

"Unlike the shamrock, which is associated exclusively with the Irish," Shields explains, "the four leaf clover has become one of the most well known good luck charms and lucky symbol around the world and across many very different cultures. It is not difficult to imagine that it is a genuinely honest mistake to relate the four leaf clover to Irishness and Irish events, but that does not preclude folks like myself from trying to correct that misimpression and set the record straight."

It seems that any Hibernophiles that hope to celebrate St. Patrick's Day should be careful with the leaf counting, or out themselves as "da Yank" to any true sons and daughters of Erin.