St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

On and around the 17th March annually, millions of people celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. There is probably some kind of celebration on every continent of the earth. The Irish Diaspora draws a tremendous sense of unity from the day. From New York to Tokyo to Sydney and many places in between, parties and parades abound. St. Patrick’s Day has become a global phenomenon. All of this came from humble beginnings. The earliest recorded evidence of St. Patrick’s Day being celebrated outside of Ireland, other than by Irish soldiers, is provided by Dublin-born Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift. In his Journal to Stella he notes that in 1713 the Westminster Parliament was closed for St. Patrick’s Day and the Mall in London was so full of decorations he thought “all the world was Irish.’ The phenomena of the St. Patrick’s Day parade can be traced back to Boston, where the Irish in Boston took to the streets on St. Patrick’s Day 1737 to celebrate the formation of the Irish Charitable Society. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York was in 1762 and seems to have been primarily designed as a recruiting rally by the English army in North America. The largest parade in the world happens in New York, with some 150,000 marchers and around 2,000,000 spectators. In the US alone there are over 300 parades with very state represented except for four.

In 1996 possibly a unique St. Patrick’s Day parade took place in a village called Keshcarrigan, Co. Leitrim. The twenty residents of the village held a ‘stationary’ parade. The village street was too short for the floats so the crowds walked among them to view ad enjoy them. Keshcarigan continued in the tradition of unusual St. Patrick’s Day parades, with a ‘backwards’ parade where everyone and everything in the parade moved backwards! They eve had an ‘invisible’ parade, with people turning up to see a parade that wasn’t there!

Whatever the parade, wherever the country St. Patrick is remembered every 17th March, where half the world claims to be Irish for a day and the other half wishes it could!!