The weather stayed dry and, even more remarkably, so did some of the post-parade events on St Patrick’s Day in Dublin.
Despite the risk inherent in the theme – “Celebrate Now” – there were notable outbreaks of sobriety amid the traditional mass drownings of shamrock. Even the city’s Barrio Alcoholico, aka Temple Bar, had a few more teetotallers than usual.
As for the feature event, it took place in conditions as benign as you get in mid-March Ireland. A grey sky refused to rain on the parade and, for once, the cool temperatures were not magnified by storm-force easterlies blowing up the Liffey. It was therefore a good-tempered crowd that waited at the GPO for the first floats to wend their way, at the speed of treacle, out of Parnell Square.
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MC Joe Taylor passed the time with quiz questions, for example, offering a spot prize to anyone who could name the Irish chieftain who first brought St Patrick to Ireland in a 5th-century kidnapping. "Gerry Adams, " suggested an informer in the crowd. But of course it wasn't Mr Adams (who can produce alibis if necessary): it was Niall of the Nine Hostages.
Entertained by such banter, we passed the time until the parade's first spectacular showpiece, the 18th-century Lord Mayor's carriage, rolled past. Built to celebrate a birthday of King William of Orange, it is these days carrying a public figure of very different colour, Cllr Christy Burke, who alighted at the GPO to join his fellow city councillors in the reviewing stand.
After him came the grand marshal, another man whose ascendancy to such prominence was once unimaginable. Brendan O’Carroll admitted so himself when describing the parade leadership role as the Irish equivalent of a knighthood and saying that his late mother would have been “blown away” to see it. “I think she thought I was going to end up in jail.”
The 3,000 parade participants ranged from an army of Texan majorettes to a few machine-pushing members of Dublin City Council’s street-cleaning department, who were given starring roles in the pageant, and richly deservedfor the amount of work they would have to do afterwards.
Miracle
In the annual St Patrick’s Day miracle, these and the other marchers were watched by an estimated half a million people, at least according to the organisers. In fact, this year the figure was put at a slightly more modest (and oddly specific) 487,000, although this was still about five times more than conventional arithmetic suggests would fit on either side of a mile-and-a-half-long route.
Then again, it’s not a straight route. On the contrary, it’s shaped a bit like one of those snakes that were driven out of Ireland 1,600 years ago. And if we can believe that, well, the annual attendance estimates are at least as credible. In any case, the crowds were sufficiently deep in places as to lend a dual purpose to this year’s must-have accessory.
The “selfie-stick” was so ubiquitous among parade attenders that if the actual Apostle of Ireland had turned up with his mitre, you’d have half-expected him to have a camera stuck on top of it, for panoramic St Patrick’s Day self-portraits (or “spelfies” as they’re probably already known). But narcissism aside, the sticks were also useful for taking pictures of the parade, over the heads of those in front.
The question of people getting "off their heads" on St Patrick's Day featured during one of the post-parade events in Temple Bar. It was raised by Dr Tony Bates of the National Centre for Youth Mental Health: not, he hastened to add, as a criticism of those so celebrating, more as a reason why some people had decided to create a space for alcohol-free revelry.
Eclectic mix
Thus Temple Bar’s Meeting House Square was a designated “Beer-less Bunker” for the evening, as Bates’s talk preceded an eclectic mix of music performers including the
Dundalk
punk poet Jinx Lennon and Ensemble Eriú, among others, who were enjoyed by an entirely sober audience.
Elsewhere in the tourist enclave, meanwhile, eclectic mixes of another kind were taking their toll: often disguised as soft drinks in plastic bottles to circumvent the official ban on street drinking.
The authorities had taken the precaution of barricading off the Central Bank plaza, a magnet for youthful socialising. But almost everywhere else was a noisy mass of revellers, many of them already interpreting the suggestion to “Celebrate Now” in the traditional Irish manner.
