Win or Luas: The day Ireland witnessed two capital St Patrick’s Day parades

IT was a case of win or Luas with the St Patrick’s Day parades yesterday.

Cork’s bigger, better, European Capital of Culture effort was a resounding winner while Dublin’s was equally impressive, but a bit shorter, in height.

A massive 700,000 spectators witnessed the vertically challenged Dublin parade, the biggest in the country which had 3,000 participants and 17 international marching bands.

Overhead Luas lines on the O’Connell Street forced many float fabricators to bow to progress and a 5.5m limit.

There was no maximum height stipulation on leprechauns, however.

In Carlow, organisers said they had the tallest parade in Ireland, but nobody managed to hold him steady long enough to get an accurate measure of his highness.

The world’s earliest parade is still the preserve of Dingle’s dawn chorus of revellers.

During the Land League, the British placed a curfew on public gathering between dusk and dawn. Not to be outdone, the locals defied the ban by marching in the early hours of the morning. Maintaining that 160-year-old tradition, locals were out and about before 6am yesterday.

To the far west of Dingle, in the next parish of Newfoundland, the good folk of Halifax, many of whom are O’Connors, O’Briens, Murphys and Ryans, were, according to Sandy MacDonald of the Halifax Daily News, on their feet and marching out the door by 7am.

“This morning at 7am, as most Haligonians were cracking the sleep out of their eyes, happy folks were washing down big fat Irish breakfasts with coal-black stouts at the Old Triangle Alehouse,” she said. “It’s the one day that most everyone yearns to be Irish.

“Plastic leprechaun hats, green beer and Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish buttons appear like spring crocuses, to celebrate the day that splinters Lenten resolve and offers respite from the weary winter.”

In Cork, 80,000 spectators turned out for the first of a three-day St Patrick’s festival which, if it goes on the way it started, will resoundingly establish the People’s Republic as the European centre of craic.

At least 70 groups and organisations were represented, including performers and musicians from the North. Among Lord Mayor Councillor Sean Martin’s guests on the viewing stand were the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the British Ambassador, as well as members of Belfast City Council.

President Mary McAleese spent her St Patrick’s Day in Tokyo; Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was in the White House and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams was still in the Dog House.

There were many other parades nationwide and as far afield as Russia, South America, Denmark, Australia, Germany, the Caribbean, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.