The extended St Patrick's Day celebrations will continue today and tomorrow, with parades and street performances throughout Ireland.
The biggest parade will be tomorrow in Dublin, setting off from St Stephen's Green at 11.30 a.m. The entertainment begins at 9 a.m. and will include bands, a fancydress road race and a Harley Davidson cavalcade.
The parade is expected to arrive at Parnell Square shortly after 2 p.m. and a monster ceili will follow at St Stephen's Green.
The Kilfenora Ceili Band will play eili and "beginners and experts alike" are encouraged to join in.
One of the more unusual celebrations tomorrow will be in Kilkenny where the parade will take place at night with the theme of "Light up the Night".
It starts at 6.30 p.m. in the Granges Road-St Canice's Place area of the city and will end with a fireworks display at Kilkenny Castle. Companies with floats in the parade are being encouraged to "use light in a creative way to add to the atmosphere".
The organisers are asking participants to use anything "from your brother's Hallowe'en sparklers to your grandmother's bicycle lamp". The route has been adapted to maximise the impact of the lighting.
The Cork city parade begins at 12.30 p.m. from St Patrick's Quay. It proceeds across the bridge to Patrick Street and from there to Grand Parade and on to the South Mall where the viewing stand is located. It is expected the parade, which has 80 entries, will take 11/2 hours to pass. The prizegiving will take place afterwards at the Metropole Hotel.
In Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, the Quaker String Band from Philadelphia will take part in the parade for the 12th year running. A flag-throwing and musical troupe from the Lake Constance area of south Germany, the Fanfarenzug Niederburg Konstanz, will also return to the town's parade.
In Belfast, performance groups from three continents will be joined by hundreds of community groups in a carnival-style parade. It starts at Wellington Place in the city centre at 12.30 p.m. and proceeds to the City Hall, where it will arrive around 1 p.m. Groups from Latin America and Africa will entertain the crowd, and the Irish language group, Breag, and the Tyrone group, More Power to Your Elbow, will also take part. Artfrique and the Beat Initiative are also participating.
Bus Eireann services will generally operate tomorrow according to a Sunday schedule. However, the Dublin-Belfast route will operate a weekday service, while extra early-morning buses will be provided on the Rosslare-Dublin and Killarney-Limerick routes.
Television coverage of the Dublin parade will begin on RTE1 at midday. RTE is filming 20 other parades around the State for the Six One News.
Tonight Galway's Macnas and Catalonia's Els Comediants will join forces in Dublin city centre for a street performance loosely based on Homer's Odyssey. They promise to take spectators to "the underworld and back" with "a lot of pyrotechnics and smoke".
The audience will be encouraged to follow the performance and meet the Cyclops, the Sirens and The Death Ship. The street theatre will start on stage at St Stephen's Green and will unfold on a series of stages along South King Street, Clarendon Street, Wicklow Street and Grafton Street before returning to the main stage for the grand finale.
