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Actually, St. Patrick is mostly a mythical creature constructed from the actual Roman ruling family Patricias.

Humph, said the camel... If so, did this 'actual Roman ruling family' author the works attributed (with scholarly acuuracy) to Patrick? More likely Patrick came from a romano-british family, probably an aristrocratic one. Many british chieftain families would have arrogated to themselves the name 'patrician', which was no more than a descriptive term for the gentes maiores in Rome, the Valerii, Claudii, Fabii and so on. A bit like the second names 'King' and 'Knight'.

The whole St. Patrick chasing out the snakes is clearly a metaphor for the Roman church killing off the pagans.

As is typical amonst the Roman church, the peasants, once suitably under control are made to believe the destruction of the old way of life was actually a blessing. The Romans pushed this on them until the old ways faded into the memory hole.

First off, the Church as it existed then was not the 'Roman church'. This was before the schisms and the rise of Islam, when the Christian Church was administered from distributed nodes (the Patriarchates of Byzantium, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Rome). Secondly, your assertion about the meaning of Patrick and the snakes is dubious. I agree it is evidently a myth, but would posit a more likely source in paganism. Many Irish gods and godesses survived well into the Christian era (some even to this day) as 'saints' of the Church. While Patrick was a historical figure, the scribes may well have thought his career too dull for one of such fame, and decided to conflate several already existing myths, and add them to the story. A common practice in Hollywood these days -- a recent example is Braveheart, where the military innovations of Robert the Bruce (a Norman, just like the French-speaking Edward I, which is not mentioned) were ascribed to the medieval feminist, democratic new man William Wallace. Hagiographies are propaganda aimed at the time in which they are written. [Off topic completely here, but I read that for the last years of his life, Stalin's only reading was his own official biography... falling in love with the myth of himself, or taken in by his own deceit?] Thirdly, Patrick's conversion of the Irish was not a conquest. Nor was the conversion of much of Europe. It's very easy, from a post-religious perspective, to be nostalgic about paganism, since we understand almost nothing of it. Neo-pagan movements are generally comic, not in their internal ideas, but in the notion that they are somehow recapturing an old religion, a religion without scriptures or documents or a continuous tradition. All the best Tiarnan