Vintage Newsreel Shows Waterford Shamrock Picked and Shipped Around the World

It’s St. Patrick’s Day! Check out this vintage newsreel footage of shamrocks being harvested from County Waterford and packaged for Irish around the world.

It's long been a tradition to sport a shamrock sprig on St. Patrick's Day. St. Patrick himself is said to have used its three leaves to teach the ancient Irish druids about the Catholic Trinity and the little plant has been part of St. Patrick's Day since the Catholic Church declared it to be the saint's official botanical symbol in the 1720s. But have you ever wondered just how Irish shamrocks get shipped around the world every March? Filmmaker and folklorist Michael Fortune, who runs the folklore.ie Facebook page, recently uncovered newsreel footage from 1965 showing just that.

The footage comes from the archives of British Pathé News, a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 through 1970.

The video, which Fortune re-edited to remove rough cuts and scratches and posted on Facebook this week, shows the harvesting of shamrock in the fields by hand as well as the cleaning and packing process at the Dunmore East packing factory in County Waterford. The shamrocks are sorted into buttonhole size sprigs and then boxed for shipment to places as far flung as Lagos, New York, Tokyo, Las Vegas, and Baghdad. He also added a score by Mary Custy and Stephen Flaherty.

“I discovered it when browsing Pathé archive last year,” Fortune says. “What struck me about this clip was the fact that it only had 59 or so views on Pathé. It really shows you what material is still out there that we don’t know about.”

Fortune wanted to share the video in hopes of getting it a wider audience, and maybe help people discover family members in the clip. “What’s great is that local people can connect with the clip more as their relatives will be in it,” he says.

Watch the full video below, and happy St. Patrick’s Day!