1999 St. Patrick Festival - Doing It In Style in Dublin

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Mar 12, 1999

Travelsleuth Stuart Buchanan MacWatt celebrates Ireland's St. Patrick's Day festival and Parade in Dublin and looks at Green celebrations around the world.

Expatriate Irish have been celebrating the soul of their Irishness with Parades on March 17th, St.Patrick's Day, for well over two centuries.

The annual Paddy day Parade in New York goes back 238 years to before the American War of Independence - the first Parade was in 1761. The war itself was halted for the Day in 1780 on Washington's Orders announcing a Stand Down to enable the Irish soldiers under his command to celebrate their Patron Saint's Day. One wonders what the opposing British forces such as His Majesty's 64th Regiment of Foot thought about that.

In 1999 The Big Apple celebrated its spectacular and boisterous St. Patricks Day Parade with its first ever female Grand Marshall, Grande Dame of the Silver Screen, the ever beautiful Maureen O'Hara, who at a sprightly and bewitching 76 could teach the modern luminaries of Hollywood a thing or two...or three!

The first Parade in Montreal, Canada, took place back in 1824 - 5 years before the great Irish leader Daniel O'Connell gained Catholic emancipation for Ireland from the government of King George IV.

Since that first Parade, wherever expatriate Irish set down their Celtic roots to create a community, be it in the cold north of Canada, rural Western Virginia, or the southern shores of Australia, they have expressed their irrepressible and joyful Irishness, turning St.Patrick's Day into the Day of The Big Parade, a day of Dance and jollity; a day that paints the world emerald green.

In Ireland, however, St.Patrick's Day was traditionally a low-key holiday.This was to change in 1997. In that year Dublin signalled its intent to vie with London for the title of "Coolest City in the World" by mounting a monster week-long St.Patrick's Festival that showed off the City's self-confidence, creative ebulliance, and bubbling joie de vie.

Under the continuing sponsorship of The Irish Times, the National flag carrier Aer Lingus and other Corporate bodies and individuals, the 1998 Dublin St.Patrick's Festival Week of celebrations exploded upon a delighted, and expectant world. Irish expats converged upon the swinging city from all parts of the globe to party the days and nights away.

I was there the following year to watch the 1999 Paddy Day celebrations fizz into spectacular pyrotechnic action over the city and the River Liffey on the day before the Big Parade with the Aer Lingus Skyfire display. Fuse lighter and orchestrater of this son et lumiere was firework Wizard, Syd Howard, (remember his Symphony of Fire at the Finale of the Atlanta Olympics?). From then on we visitors were caught up in a city-wide street party and Carnival until the Great Parade. Then it was Party Time through to the Millenium! Yes, the Dubliners started their Big Party 9 months early!