Sir, - It is a pity that the sculptor of the controversial new sculpture of St Patrick for the Hill of Tara (February 13th), and the Department of the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht did not first consult the earliest physical description of St Patrick.
This occurs in a couple of verses included in the 9th-century Tripartite Life of St Patrick (written in old Irish) in which St Patrick is nicknamed Talcenn. This means "Adze-head" and refers to the way his hair was cut in a tonsure. According to the poem, therefore, St Patrick's head was not completely shaven. The poem goes on to describe him as wearing a mantle (bratt) with a hole cut in it for his head (not a knee-length tunic) and carrying a staff with a crook on its top (not a deer's antler).
That this poem is considerably older than the 9th century is attested by the fact that a Latin translation of it occurs in the 7th-century Life of St Patrick written by Muirchu. It seems 19 go back even further than Muirchu's time, since he himself says that the language of the poem was unclear.
Talcenn, therefore, may well have been a genuine nickname given to St Patrick.
The question must be asked, though, why put a statue of St Patrick on the Hill of Tara in the first place? St Patrick is unlikely ever to have been there, and the story of his confrontation with King Laoghaire's druids is fiction from beginning to end and was invented a couple of centuries after the saint's death.
It would be much more appropriate to put a statue of Secondinus on the hill.
Secondinus - in Irish, Sechnall - a Gaulish bishop, who had his church at Domhnach Sechnall (Dunshaughlin), almost certainly proselytised at Tara and may well have been the first person to do so. - Yours, etc.,
Chapelizod Court, Dublin 20.