114 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



St. Patrick's staff was given to Mae Cairthinn along with the shrine, while the 

 Tripartite Life makes no allusion to the staff in this connexion. On the other 

 hand, the Tripartite Life adds the statement that the Domnach " had been 

 sent to Patrick from heaven when he was at sea coming towards Ireland." 1 

 This of itself raises the suspicion that the staff had originally a place in the 

 story ; for the words are an accurate summary of what we are told elsewhere 

 in the same work about the Bauhal Isu. When Patrick had parted from 

 Geruianus, and was voyaging to Ireland, at Mount Hermon, in the neighbour- 

 hood of an island on which he had stayed for three days, " the Lord appeared 

 to him, and toll him to _'" and preach to the Gael, and gave him the staff of 

 Jesu-- '- Now at least as early as tin- twelfth century the staff of Jesus was 

 one of the principal treasures of the Church of Armagh. 5 It was therefore to 

 be expected that a biographer of St Patrick a couple of centuries earlier 

 would suppress the statement that it was given to another see. Thus the origin 

 of the story may be pushed ba distance before the document 



In the Tripartite Lif< — let us Bay t" the middle of the tenth century. 



But again Buch a story, even if it were deliberately invented, could not 

 gain mil _ the shrine. It cannot be 



Bupposed to bavi ited until the circumstances of the construction of 



the shrine and the name of its maker had passed into oblivion. The shrine 

 can hardly b bury earlier than the tradition which made it 



•• .il with St. Patrick and St. Mac Cairthinn. Hence we may conclude, 

 with some confidence, that the latest date which can possibly be assigned to it 

 i> the tatter half of the ninth century. 



But we may go Further. A tradition such as we arc considering cannot 

 have come into beinf - generation in a vacuum. Before it 



arose there must ha - or beliefs which were the seed 



out of which it men could have come to believe that the 



Domnach w - - I urthinn they must have assumed that it 



M s Cairthinn, and that again implies the belief that it 

 was then, and had l>een from time immemorial, at St. Mac Cain hinn's church 

 of Clogher. Thus it appears that the shrine had been at Clogher for a long 

 period before the tradition took shape in its simplest and earliest guise. 

 The interval required for the evolution of the story of the donation out of 

 the belief that the Domnach had belonged to St. Mac Cairthinn cannot, of 

 course, be del We Bhall regard it as longer or shorter according as 



we suppose the tradition to ha I >ped in the natural course, or the later 



story to have been a deliberate fabrication. Our view will also be affected 

 by the opinion which we may hold as to the antiquity of the belief that 



krtite Life, p. 31. ' Ibid., p. 171. - Bernard V. S. Malackiae, 24. 



