Record crowds celebrated Ireland’s national holiday on Thursday as a parade led by the nation’s most prominent disabled rights activist snaked its way through Dublin on St Patrick’s Day.
Parade grand marshal Joanne O’Riordan, who was born without arms or legs, beamed a joyous smile as she steered a special scooter past an estimated 550,000 people lining the route of the parade across the River Liffey to St Patrick’s Cathedral.
O’Riordan, who at 19 already has addressed the UN and embarrassed the government into reversing cuts to disabled services, led a parade that featured giant snakes, several St Patricks, entertainers and animals dressed in every color of the rainbow, as well as dollops of irreverent humor.
Photo: Reuters
Tourism officials said Dublin was experiencing its biggest tourist wave connected to St Patrick’s Day, which is the centerpiece of a four-day festival.
Most Dublin hotels are booked solid through the end of the month as many stay through Easter, when Ireland commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the ill-fated Dublin rebellion that inspired Ireland’s 1919 to 1921 war of independence from Britain.
Irish President Michael Higgins, who attended Thursday’s parade with a sprig of freshly cut shamrock in his lapel, called on Ireland to embrace the idealism of the rebels of a century ago.
“When we Irish are at our best, we are a nation defined by a commitment to human rights, creative imagination and, at a global level, the upholding of freedom from oppression,” Higgins said in a video address.
In his St Patrick’s Day message the leader of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics, Archbishop Eamon Martin, expressed hope that Europe would show greater sympathy to people fleeing war and poverty.
Martin described Patrick — a Briton originally taken to Ireland as a slave and who returned to spread Christianity across the pagan island — as an undocumented migrant as well.
He said Patrick’s life story mirrored “the growing numbers of people who find themselves displaced and without status in our world.”
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