what is Crocus? As compared to saffron?
Crocus is a flower, Crocus sativus, the dried stigmas of which make the spice saffron. While some authors claim that the color saffron is derived from the use of the spice as a dye, when you consider that each flower has three stigmas which must be picked by hand, it takes about 4,000 stigmas to yield one ounce of the dye, and status, wealth and privilege among Irish nobility was displayed by the yardage of their léinte (imagine something like a woman's chemise, made of 45' or so of yellow linen, the skirts pleated beneath a belt and pulled up so the blouse is baggy), it's clear that very few beyond the High Kings could've possibly afforded to use it as a dye. More likely, "saffron" in this case refers to the color; a yellow similar to that produced by saffron. Due to the status inferred by very a voluminous saffron-dyed léine (in 1541 Parliament at Dublin tried to codify various yardages to various social classes, in descending order), those who couldn't afford real saffron would use cheaper dyes that produced a similar color (perhaps made from lichens like Sticta crocata or Solorinacrocea). The modern "saffron" kilt is almost a light burnt ochre; very different from the bright canary yellow of true saffron.
As the wearing of saffron implied high social status, it was repeatedly banned by the English.
In 1900 Seamas O Ceallaigh of the Gaelic League asked Pádraig Pearse (who 16 years later would read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on the front steps of the Dublin GPO) about developing an Irish national dress, perhaps based upon a pair of trews which had been found at Killery, County Sligo dated from about the 16th century in the Royal Irish Academy Collection in the National Museum in Dublin.
On October 26 Pearse wrote:
"...one would at first sight take them for a rather clumsily made and ill-treated pair of modern gentleman's drawers. Frankly, I should much prefer to see you arrayed in a kilt, although it may be less authentic, than in a pair of these trews. You would if you appeared in the latter, run the risk of leading the spectators to imagine that you had forgotten to don your trousers and had sallied forth in your drawers."
The color saffron was chosen not only as being distinctly Irish, but as an act of nationalism and defiance of the English occupation. The saffron kilt was worn by Bernard FitzPatrick and Pierce O Mahoney while campaigning for home rule in Parliament in the 1880’s, by Douglas Hyde, the first President of Ireland in 1938, and by the pipers of all three Army regiments and the Air Corps of the Óglaigh na h-Eireann, the Irish Defense Forces, and the Royal Irish Regiment today.