Madam, – Walking through the centre of Dublin following the parade on St Patrick’s Day, I immediately understood why our elected officials exit the country for the day. The streets were lined with fast food wrappers, empty bottles and various others items of rubbish alongside teenage drunks and puddles of vomit. A horrible sight at any time, but on our national holiday? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines a myth as “traditional narrative usually involving supernatural or imaginary persons and often embodying popular ideas on natural or social phenomena, etc.”
The attendance of 650,000 persons reported in your headline (Home News, March 18th) as attending the Dublin St Patrick’s Day parade has by now surely entered into the realms of Patrician mythology along with the snakes and shamrocks. What a fabulous number, 200 people squashed into every linear metre of the route. It could only be a miracle.
And whom do we have to thank for this startling statistic? Why the organisers, of course. To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies during one of the Profumo affair trials in 1963 when Lord Astor denied ever meeting or having an affair with her: Well they would, wouldn’t they? – Yours, etc,