TAOISEACH Brian Cowen will open a new €85 million cardiac and renal centre at Cork University Hospital (CUH) tomorrow.

A section of an abandoned overhead railway line in New York City will open to the public today as a landscaped park, the first of its kind in the United States.

DESPITE the competing sporting attractions of rugby, GAA and cricket and variable weather conditions, several hundred thousand turned out in Dublin on Saturday to partake in the annual St Patrick’s Day festivities.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn plans to march in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade this year, again snubbing the American parade because of its organisers’ refusal to allow gay and lesbian groups to march.

New York City Council’s first openly gay leader, who is boycotting today’s parade because organisers barred Irish gays and lesbians from joining the festivities for the 16th straight year, blasted its chairman for remarks that compared gay Irish-American activists to neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and prostitutes.

GAA chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic last night reiterated that the New York board fully support a decision to abandon stadium development plans for the Randall’s Island site in the big apple.

NEW YORK GAA chiefs have axed all "weekend pass" excursions from Ireland for the country's top Gaelic footballers.