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DoChara's Ireland Blog
Random Writings about Ireland and the Irish
Saturday
March 17 2007
St Patrick wouldn't recognise it!
I remember just about very St Patrick's Day of my childhood as being spent standing in the rain watching marching bands, American majorettes with legs blue from the cold and lorries bearing fairly tacky commerical 'floats' procede incredibly slowly down O'Connell Street.
To be fair, at the time I thought it was all pretty exciting - the majorettes in particular seemed like exotic beings parachuted in from another planet - though as the years passed and the sameness of it all became ever more evident it seriously palled.
But St Patrick's Day in Dublin has morphed in recent years into a colourful, exhuberant and multi-cultural Mardi Gras. I don't know what the man himself would make of it, but I reckon even he would prefer it to the unrelentng greyness that marked his feast in the past.
Images by infomatique
One of the weirdest aspects of St Patrick's Days past was the huge crowds of Dubliners who spent the best part of it attending a Dog Show. It wasn't that the city had more dog lovers then, it was just that the pubs used to close that day and the only place with a license to sell alcohol was the bar at the Irish Kennel Club annual championship show at the RDS in Ballsbridge.
Comments on "St Patrick wouldn't recognise it!"
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Posted by: William
19 Mar 2007, 12:22
For all the changes rain can still stop play. Pity about fire on the liffey
it would have been great. BTW, nice to see you back ;)
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