Patrick Of Mallorca

As if you needed reminding, it's Saint Patrick's Day on Tuesday. While Mallorca indulges itself in a saintly ritual of Guinness drinking and the wearing of leprechaun beards, forgotten is the fact that Patrick is not only the global trademark for Irishness, he is also a Catholic saint, albeit one who has never actually been canonised. As such, therefore, he registers on the saintly calendar. 17 March, the day of Patrick's death at the age of 120. Supposedly.

You may not know that Patrick, aka Patricio, is the patron saint of the city of Murcia. Separated by a few hundred kilometres of sea, this patronage does at least lend some added, though rather tenuous, religious boost to a boozy Mallorcan celebration. Patricio never actually made it to Murcia by the way. It just so happened that the reconquest of Murcia coincided with his feast day: hence, the patronage status.

Patricio's association with Mallorca is, let's be honest, altogether more secular than religious, and this association finds no greater expression than in Santa Ponsa, where tomorrow they will have conveniently brought forward the feast day by 48 hours. Saint Patrick of Ponsa is a de facto patron, one for Irish tourism and so for Joe Walsh and the Irish tour operators who discovered the Deya Apartments and other establishments in the early 1970s and colonised a resort in the style of Magalluf for the British (minus the Celtic Brits) and Arenal for the Germans.

It is tempting to think that the Celtic-Santa Ponsa association is of very much more ancient origin, from a time closer to when Patrick was knocking around in the fifth century. Both Santa and Ponsa might have their roots in an old Celtic language - "sant" and "pont" existed in this language and they both referred to bodies of water or marsh. However the name was derived, one thing is for sure: there was never a saint called Ponsa.

Wedged between this antiquity and the modernity of tourism, there is an entirely different story regarding Ireland's association with Mallorca. It is one of migration which was partly the consequence of repression and persecution of Irish Catholics by Protestant Britain, partly commercial and partly engineered.

Oliver Cromwell has to take much of the credit - or blame, if you prefer - for this association. Land confiscation and all-round tyranny drove members of the Catholic elite (those who survived) to seek refuge away from Ireland. Catholic Spain welcomed them. Without necessarily becoming Spanish as such, they were afforded great privileges - both merchant and military.

It was some fifty years after Cromwell died and the Protectorate came to an end that events in Spain were reaching a bloody conclusion which brought about its own repression. Settlement following the War of the Spanish Succession had stripped Spain of some possessions, but within Spain, Felipe V was busying himself bringing opposition to an end and securing for the House of Bourbon all parts of the country. This was to mean the defeat of his opponents in Catalonia and those from the Crown of Aragon, which included Mallorca. Felipe issued the Nueva Planta decrees, Catalonia was subjugated, the Crown of Aragon disappeared.

The loss of those possessions made it important that no more were lost. To the north of Mallorca was - still is - Menorca. The settlement had turned it into a British possession. And if the British had any ambitions regarding other Balearic islands, Felipe wasn't about to hang around and let them realise them. Mallorca was reinforced both commercially and militarily. There was, therefore, a wave of immigration, and among these immigrants were trusted and privileged Irish, loyal to the Spanish crown.

So, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, an Irish "colony" became established. It was never vast by any means but it was to later be added to by another wave of an elite with Irish origins which, again mainly for military reasons, came to Mallorca during the Peninsular War against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

Of those who came to Mallorca in the eighteenth century was an Irishman who had been born after the period of the Cromwell tyranny (in Kilkenny in 1676). He became a devoted ally of Felipe V and he arrived in Mallorca in 1726 and was installed as the governor and captain-general of the island. His surname was corrupted to Laules. Originally, it was probably Lawless, though there is some debate. But, and in keeping with the current celebrations, his Christian name was appropriate. Patricio. Patrick.

There are of course descendants from the waves of Irish immigration, their names having generally been altered to fit the Mallorcan dialect. And of those one-time O'Neills, O'Ryans or indeed Lawlesses, how many will be now donning a leprechaun's beard and downing a pint of Guinness?