SNAKES ALIVE!

Press, 2 September 1980, Page 21

SNAKES ALIVE!

From

SELWYN PARKER

in Dublin

The very foundations of Ireland’s rich mythology shook a few days ago when Farmer ’ Henry Quinn, from a township called Roo in County Galway, discovered a snake on ids kitchen floor. . In any other European country the . snake’s- presence might have been i n t e r e s t i n g, even noteworthybut certainly not of national consequence, This was different. Nobody had seen a snake in Ireland since Saint Patrick apparently,

with no more than a casual wave of his arm, banished . “all snakes and venomous reptiles’* from . the Emerald Isles somewhere in the middle of the fifth century AD. The snakes’ obedience was instant and total, according to the mythographers. Today, statues and pictures attest the Apostle of Ireland’s deed. And, along

with his use of the shamrock to explain the Trinity to the heathen Irish, his exile of the snakes is what he is best remembered , for. (The fact that he converted the natives to Christianity is apparently assumed.) So, has St Patrick’s spell on the serpents worn off? Farmer Quinn quickly sought the corroboration

of other witnesses to establish that the foot-long creature was real. It was. In haste, the residents of Roo contacted Ireland’s herpetologists in the zoology department of Gal- , way University. After urgent, even panicky study, tiie experts issued a statement: the Roo reptile was not a serpent. The mythographers breathed again.

It.was, in fact, a slow or blind worm the: rare anguis fragiHs. But here it

gets very Irish. Anguis fragiHs , is. neither.: slow, blind, nor worm. Rather, it’s a legless lizard. -Its discovery,;.noted a writer in the "Irish Time,” is highly symbolic in view of the nation’s: high unemployment; rising balance of payments. deficit, record interest rates, etc. * ■ He wrote: “Anguis fragills, like our. present govhasn’t a leg to stand 0n...”