St. Patrick lived roughly 1,600 years ago and historians will tell you he wasn’t really Irish – he was probably Welsh. Legend has it that he was kidnapped as a teenager by pirates and taken to Ireland, where he was enslaved. He escaped and eventually became the patron saint of Ireland. (After becoming a Bishop, he went back to Ireland and ultimately died there.) He was never an engineer and there haven’t been snakes in Ireland since before the last ice age.
You see, there is a big difference between St. Patrick and St. Pat.
Read the full story.
Er, the story I heard from back before I was even a ‘lower than one cubic centimeter of white whale droppings’ Baby Rep was that St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, converting people from a religion that somehow had something to do with snakes, thus he ‘drove the snakes’ out of Ireland.
And of course, for those stuck at a technical (spell that mostly male) school in the middle of then nowhere looking for any reason to have a party – went to figuring that anyone smart enough to figure out how to drive the snakes out of Ireland just had to be an engineer!
Thus, the reason (at least the one I was told) as to how St. Pat became the patron saint of engineers.