Which Saint Patrick are we celebrating?

Time was, you knew where you were with the patron saint of Ireland whose feast is 17 March. He was a Briton and he tells us in his Confessions that, when he was a teenager, he was captured by Irish slave traders and taken to Ireland, where he herded sheep. He turned to God and was told that he would escape; he duly got a passage back home. But in a dream, he heard the Irish calling out to him to come back to Ireland and walk again among them, and he knew his mission was to bring them the gospel. So he had himself consecrated bishop, returned to Ireland in AD 432 and converted the Irish in short order, with many miracles. He drove the snakes out of Ireland and illustrated the doctrine of the Trinity by means of a shamrock: three persons in one God, as in the little trefoil – three leaves, one stem.