St. Patrick's Day Trivia for Kids
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95 free St. Patrick's Day Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
St. Patrick's Day trivia for kids should be green, silly and just a little bit surprising: why we wear green, what a shamrock has to do with anything, whether Saint Patrick really chased out the snakes, and how a river in Chicago ends up bright green every March. These 95 questions start with the easy stuff and work up to the real history behind the holiday. The set covers Saint Patrick's actual life story, shamrocks and four-leaf clovers, leprechauns and pots of gold, parades and the Chicago River, Irish words and traditions, and a few fun records like landmarks going green around the world. Every answer is checked against a cited source and each explanation adds one more fact. Use it for a classroom party, a family dinner or a car ride to the parade. Play a round now and see how many you can get right.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which date is St. Patrick's Day celebrated?
March 17
March 17 is the date Saint Patrick is traditionally said to have died; it joined the Catholic Church's official calendar only in the early 1600s, after the Irish friar Luke Wadding pressed for it.
Q 02Which two other saints share the title of patron saint of Ireland with Patrick?
Brigid and Columba
Brigid and Columba join Patrick as Ireland's patron saints; Brigid is said to have founded a famous monastery at Kildare, and Columba, also called Colmcille, founded the monastery on Iona about 563.
Q 03Where was Saint Patrick actually born?
Britain
Britain was Patrick's birthplace, then under Roman rule; his father was a church deacon and his grandfather a priest, yet he wrote that as a boy he did not know the true God.
Q 04Who kidnapped the sixteen-year-old Patrick from his family's home and carried him off into slavery?
Irish pirates
Irish pirates raided his family's estate when he was about sixteen and, by his own account, carried him across the sea along with thousands of other captives.
Q 05How did Patrick escape slavery in Ireland?
Fled to a ship
Fled to a ship: a voice in a dream told him one was ready, and by his own account the port lay some two hundred miles from where he was held.
Q 06Irish farmers planted potatoes after St. Patrick's Day expecting what to improve?
The weather
Tradition held that the weather would improve once St. Patrick's Day had passed, so Irish farmers waited until after the feast to plant their potatoes for the year.
Q 07According to legend, what did Saint Patrick use the shamrock to explain?
The Holy Trinity
The Holy Trinity, one God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is what legend says he taught with the plant; yet the story first appears in writing in 1726, some 1,200 years after Patrick lived.
Q 08Which creatures did Saint Patrick supposedly chase out of Ireland?
Snakes
Snakes are what legend says Patrick banished from Ireland, but there were none to chase: the island has had no snakes since the last Ice Age, when rising water cut it off from Europe.
Q 09Which ancient Irish field sport is played with flat-ended wooden sticks and a small ball called a sliotar?
Hurling
Hurling is played with a wooden stick called a hurley, and a player on the run may carry the ball balanced on its flat end, a move called a solo.
Q 10In Irish folklore, what is a leprechaun's trade when he isn't guarding his gold?
Shoemaker
Shoemaker: in the old tales the leprechaun is a cranky, solitary fairy who mends the shoes of the other fairies, and he is usually pictured at work on a single shoe.
Q 11In Irish folklore, where does a leprechaun supposedly hide his pot of gold?
At the end of the rainbow
At the end of the rainbow is the perfect hiding place, because nobody can get there: a rainbow has no fixed spot and shifts with whoever is looking at it.
Q 12Which US city dyes its river bright green every year for St. Patrick's Day?
Chicago
Chicago first dyed its river in 1962; the idea came from city workers who used green dye to trace illegal sewage leaks and saw how well it would suit the holiday.
Q 13St. Patrick's Day parades began on which continent, long before Ireland held any?
North America
Q 21Botanically speaking, what is a four-leaf clover?
A rare mutation of ordinary clover
A rare mutation of ordinary clover produces the extra leaflet; scientists still debate how much is due to the plant's genes and how much to the conditions it grows in.
Q 22Roughly how many ordinary clovers would you have to search to find one four-leaf clover?
5,000
A survey of millions of clovers found one four-leaf clover for roughly every 5,000 ordinary ones, twice as common as the old saying of one in 10,000.
Q 23What is a person supposed to gain by kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland?
The gift of the gab
North America staged the earliest known parades: one in the Spanish colony of St. Augustine, Florida, in 1601, and another by Irish soldiers of the British army in New York in the 1760s.
Q 14What does the Irish greeting 'céad míle fáilte', seen on signs, mean?
A hundred thousand welcomes
A hundred thousand welcomes: céad is hundred, míle is thousand and fáilte is welcome, and Ireland's tourism board took that last word for its own name, Fáilte Ireland.
Q 15Which Caribbean island counts St. Patrick's Day as a public holiday?
Montserrat
Montserrat was settled by Irish Catholics in the 1600s and keeps St. Patrick's Day as a public holiday; the day also remembers a slave uprising planned for the feast in 1768.
Q 16Which famous building turned green in 2010 to help launch Tourism Ireland's Global Greening for St. Patrick's Day?
The Sydney Opera House
The Sydney Opera House and Auckland's Sky Tower were the first two sites lit for the Global Greening in 2010; since then more than 300 landmarks in some fifty countries have joined in.
Q 17The name Dublin comes from two Irish words that together mean what?
Black pool
Black pool, from dubh, black, and linn, pool: the name described a dark tidal pool that once lay where the gardens of Dublin Castle are today.
Q 18What is Seachtain na Gaeilge, held in Ireland in the fortnight before St. Patrick's Day?
Irish Language Week
Seachtain na Gaeilge means Irish Language Week, yet the celebration has outgrown its name: it now runs for more than two weeks in the run-up to St. Patrick's Day.
Q 19Saint Patrick is said to be buried in a town that bears his name, in which Irish county?
Down
Down is the county: tradition places his grave beside Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, though the inscribed granite slab that marks the spot was laid there only in 1900.
Q 20What is Ireland's official state emblem, shown on its coins, passports and coat of arms?
A harp
A harp is Ireland's state emblem, used on its coins, passports and official seals; a harp also stands for Ireland on the royal arms of the United Kingdom.
The gift of the gab means a way with words, and the stone's fame gave English the word 'blarney' for smooth, flattering talk.
Q 24The 'drowning the shamrock' custom ends St. Patrick's Day by putting a shamrock where?
In the bottom of a cup
In the bottom of a cup is where the shamrock goes: the cup is filled for a toast, and afterwards the shamrock is fished out and tossed over the shoulder.
Q 25Which river flows through the centre of Dublin?
The Liffey
The Liffey flows through the centre of Dublin, where the Ha'penny Bridge takes its name from the halfpenny toll that walkers once paid to cross it.
Q 26The Irish stepdancing show that became a worldwide hit in 1994 was called what?
Riverdance
Riverdance began as a seven-minute interval act at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin, starring Michael Flatley and Jean Butler, before growing into a full stage show.
Q 27Which Canadian province gives its government workers a holiday for St. Patrick's Day?
Newfoundland
Newfoundland and Labrador keeps St. Patrick's Day as a provincial government holiday; Irish migrants settled the island in the 1700s, and about one in five residents claims Irish ancestry.
Q 28What did astronaut Chris Hadfield do for St. Patrick's Day 2013 aboard the ISS?
Wore green and sang Danny Boy
Chris Hadfield wore green and sang Danny Boy, recording the song in orbit 'for the Irish everywhere' while he was commander of the space station.
Q 29Which traditional Irish dish became corned beef in Irish-American kitchens?
Bacon and cabbage
Bacon and cabbage is the traditional Irish dinner of boiled pork with cabbage and potatoes; Irish immigrants in New York swapped the bacon for cheaper corned beef.
Q 30How long a lease did Arthur Guinness sign on his Dublin brewery in 1759?
9,000 years
9,000 years was the term Arthur Guinness signed for in 1759, at 45 pounds a year; the lease no longer applies, because the company later bought the land outright.