Saint Patrick who is the most generally recognized patron saint of Ireland, although Brigid of Kildare and Colmcille are also formally patron saints.

When he was about 16 he was captured from Britain by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for six years before escaping and returning to his family.
After entering the Church, he returned to Ireland as an ordained bishop in the north and west of the island, but little is known about the places where he worked.

By the seventh century he had come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland.
The Irish monastery system evolved after the time of Patrick and the Irish church did not develop the diocesan model that Patrick and the other early missionaries had tried to establish.

The dates of Patrick’s life cannot be fixed with certainty, but on a widespread interpretation he was active as a missionary in Ireland during the second half of the 5th century.
Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17th), supposedly the day of his death, is celebrated both in and outside of Ireland, as both a liturgical and non-liturgical holiday. In Ireland it is both a solemnity and a holy day of obligation and outside of Ireland, it can be a celebration of Ireland itself.

Two Latin letters survive which are generally accepted to have been written by Patrick.
These are the Declaration and the Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus
The Declaration is the more important of the two. In it Patrick gives a short account of his life and his mission.
His parents were Calphurnius and Conchessa.
The former belonged to a Roman family of high rank and held the office of decurio in Gaul or Britain.
Conchessa was a near relative of the great patron of Gaul, St Martin of Tours. In or about his sixteenth year, Patrick was carried into captivity by marauders and was sold as a slave to an Irish chieftan named Milchu in Dalriada, an area in present-day county Antrim.

Here, for six years he tended his master’s flocks at the valley of the Braid and the slopes of Slemish, near the modern town of Ballymena.
He relates in his “Confessio”: “But after I reached Hibernia I used to pasture the flock each day and I used to pray many times a day.
More and more did the Love of God, and my fear of Him and faith increase, and my spirit was moved so that in a day [I said] from one up to a hundred prayers, and in the night a like number; besides I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time”.

As Providence had it, the six years of Patrick’s captivity became a preparation for his future apostolate.
He acquired a perfect knowledge of the Celtic tongue which he would later use to announce the Good News of Jesus Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.
Also during this time, as Milchu his master was a high druid, the young saint became familiar with the details of the aboriginal Irish religions.

The saint recounts in his “Confessio” how he heard a voice in his sleep compelling him to leave his master and find a ship that awaited him, and after the six years of servitude he fled his cruel master. “And it was there of course that one night in my sleep I heard a voice saying to me: “You do well to fast: soon you will depart for your home country.” And again, a very short time later, there was a voice prophesying: “Behold, your ship is ready.” And it was not close by, but, as it happened, two hundred miles away, where I had never been nor knew any person. And shortly thereafter I turned about and fled from the man with whom I had been for six years, and I came, by the power of God who directed my route to advantage (and I was afraid of nothing), until I reached that ship.”

He relates traveling about 200 miles, probably towards Killala Bay then on towards Westport.
As he says, his God’s providence brought him to the ship, which was ready to set sail, however, once the captain found that Patrick had no money, he refused to let the young saint on board.
He tells it best: “the steersman was displeased and replied in anger, sharply: “By no means attempt to go with us.” Hearing this I left them to go to the hut where I was staying, and on the way I began to pray, and before the prayer was finished I heard one of them shouting loudly after me: “Come quickly because the men are calling you.”

The journey itself was not without incident either, as their food supplies were not enough for the voyage and many of the crew began to starve after some twenty-eight days meandering through uninhabited regions of England.

According to the latest reconstruction of the old Irish annals, Patrick died in AD 461 on March 17, a date accepted by some modern historians.[33] Prior to the 1940s it was believed without doubt that he died in 420 and thus had lived in the first half of the 5th century

St. Patrick is said to be buried at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, County Down, alongside St. Brigid and St. Columba, although this has never been proven.