Ireland is one of the few places in the world that has no snakes in the wild. No matter how hard you look, it is a hundred percent sure thing that you will not find a single snake crawling around the grass. But how is this possible?
Well, the Irish land belongs in an exclusive club among other countries like Iceland, Greenland, New Zealand, Hawaii amongst others. A snake free club. The one thing that every country in that club has in common is that they are islands.
That could probably be the reason, except that the United Kingdom, an island, has snakes, and it is right next to Ireland. So, what is the reason?
The Myth of Saint Patrick and Snakes
Legend has it that it was Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, who dealt with all the snakes from the land of the four-leaved clovers.
If you ever were in Ireland, have Irish blood running through your body or ever been to a bar on March 17th, you know who Saint Patrick is. But if you don’t know or you forgot about it, here is a quick history lesson.
The exact date is not known, but it is believed that Saint Patrick lived in either the fourth or fifth century AD. He was born in the territory of the British Island that was under the control of the Roman Empire.
Even though his grandfather was a priest, he was not involved in the catholic faith in his youth. The first important moment in his life happened when he was sixteen years of age. He was captured by pirates and taken as a hostage to Ireland. He was held captive in the Irish countryside and was kept as a slave, working the fields and taking care of animals.
That is where he had his first serious encounter with religion. In his memoirs, named the Confessions of Saint Patrick, the saint explains that the hardship that he underwent for six years working as a slave helped him get in touch with his spiritual side.
He developed a strong relationship with God through prayer and understood he could be forgiven for his sinful youth.
Six years after he was captured, he heard a voice telling him that he was close to going back home. He fled from his captors and found a boat, where after three days worth of sailing and thirty worth of wandering through the British lands, he found his family.
Back home, Saint Patrick kept strengthening his Christian faith and eventually decided to go back where he was once held captive to spread the gospel and convert Irish pagans.
It is believed that Saint Patrick’s Day symbol of a three-leaved leaf was what he used to explain to the pagans what the Holy Trinity is. According to the legend, Saint Patrick used a wooden staff to help him walk. He used to thrust his cane into the ground whenever he was evangelizing.
It is believed that he took so much time to evangelize the people of Aspatria, that he thrust his wooden staff into the land at the beginning and by the time he was finished, the cane had rooted into the land and became a tree.
However, the most famous story surrounding Saint Patrick’s life is the one that explains why there are no snakes in Ireland. And that is because Saint Patrick banished every single one othem into the sea. The most well-known version of this story tells that Saint Patrick was fasting, trying to get closer to God and snakes kept attacking him during his forty-day penitence. Eventually, the patron saint of Ireland decided that he had enough and chased every single one of the snakes into the sea, where they were banished from Ireland forever.
Saint Patrick’s snake story has had skeptics about it from the first time it was ever recorded. And modern times are no exception when it comes to doubting the story.
Why are there really no Snakes in Ireland?
Science begs to differ when it comes to Irish snake banishing. What’s more, scientific research says that there were no WILD snakes at all in Ireland. Ever.
According to scientific research, there is no evidence that snakes were in Ireland at any point in its history. And most reptiles that lived in Ireland were killed by the cold that ensued during the last Ice Age, over ten thousand years ago.
Any type of reptile whether it is snake, lizard, turtle or whatever kind it is has cold blood.
If you have cold blood running through your veins you need warm weather to function and to survive. The last Ice Age killed any opportunity whatsoever for reptiles to find heat of any kind, as the isles were covered in ice and the coldest weather imaginable.
Before the Ice Age happened, it is believed that a land bridge existed between the European mainland and the British Island.
And another land bridge existed as a passage between the British Island and Ireland. But the window of opportunity was not the same for those two bridges. When the glaciers melted, marking the end of an era, both bridges were drowned. The bridge between the Irish and British people disappeared eighty-five hundred years ago.
But the bridge between European land and British territory was available for another two thousand years. That means that animals of any kind had more time to go to Britain and get accustomed to the lands there than they had for any Irish opportunity.
Researchers believe that is why Britain has had three kinds of snakes during its history and Ireland none at all. They just had more time to get on their respective bridges before the end of the Ice Age drowned any other possibility.
This means that even though reptiles could have gone from Europe to Britain and from Britain to Ireland they never got the chance or never had the need to do so as there are no snake fossils in Ireland.
Even if there are no snakes in Ireland, a snake fossil would have proved that snakes did indeed exist there once. The British people, on the other hand, has three different types of snakes living in their homeland.
But how come in hundred of thousands of years no snake ever crawled its way towards Ireland? Before the melting glaciers killed any possibility to walk -or if you were a snake, crawl- from Europe to Britain and then to Ireland, before the Ice Age could have killed any reptiles there, it is believed that everything was connected by land.
How come no snakes ever decided to go to Ireland, even in the remotest of times? If that was the case, we could find the snake fossil in Ireland to prove that sometime in the past a snake enjoyed the Irish view.
The answer to that question is fairly simple. It is because Ireland was underwater for a long time. There was no way that a snake could have found his way into the Irish land if it was under the ocean.
If you want to go at it chronologically, you can have a look at it in this way. At first, Ireland was buried underwater. When the Earth’s climate changed and Ireland was finally allowed to resurface, it was only then that the three places were connected: Ireland, Britain, and Europe. That is the window of opportunity for the snakes to get down to Saint Patrick’s land.
According to science, they did not -or at least we have no way of knowing if they ever did- because there are no snake fossils in Ireland. After that, the window of opportunity closed forever as the Ice Age hit the world and temperatures in the islands that are north of Europe reached historical lows, covering the entire territory in ice and glaciers, making it impossible for snakes to live there.
When the Ice Age finally was over the glaciers melted, but so did the chance of anyone to walk from Britain to Ireland, as the land bridges were buried underwater, just like Ireland once was. At this point, snakes have no chance of going there, as Ireland is surrounded by water.
Pet Snakes in Ireland
And so, it seems, there are no snakes in Ireland because they never got there. That means that nobody killed them or banished them into the sea. But what about the possibility of snakes getting there, somehow, after the Ice Age or even Saint Patrick?
Snakes are mostly all over the world and with human pet trade, they could get everywhere. At the beginning of the article, it was written that the only places that have no snakes are islands. But that is changing quickly. One example of this is Guam, an American territory in Micronesia.
Snakes had no way to get on the island except for humans taking them there. Eventually, someone got snakes in Guam and they are now decimating the native bird’s population.
It has gotten so bad that the government started to throw dead mice laced with poison to kill the snakes.
It is a possibility that Ireland could face the same problem somewhere in the future. But it could also be that their patron saint, Saint Patrick, is protecting Ireland from snakes ever getting into the island.