This year's St Patrick's Day celebrations in Ennis have been cancelled by the town council due to public liability insurance costs, it emerged yesterday.
Plans were well advanced for the annual parade through Ennis's narrow medieval streets. However, the council's insurers told the council that it could not offer blanket cover to the dozens of bands and groups involved.
It is the second Patrick's Day parade to be cancelled in the mid-west due to increasing insurance costs. The organisers of the Abbeyfeale parade in Co Limerick were forced to cancel after indications that their bill would soar by more than 400 per cent.
The Mayor of Ennis, Cllr Peter Considine (FF), said yesterday: "It is extremely disappointing, because we believed that this was going to be the best St Patrick's parade ever in Ennis.
"We cannot expect individual voluntary groups to pay their own insurance for the day. It is too much of an imposition on them."
Independent council member, Mr Frank Neylon, said: "It would not make much sense paying a band to play in the parade and then asking them to pay €200 to an insurer to cover them for the two hours. I would have fears that massive insurance costs could cancel parades organised by local authorities across the country."
A long-time participant in the Ennis parade is the Ennis Brass Band, whose leader, Mr Bernard McAllister, said: "We are terribly disappointed that the parade has been cancelled. It is a shame that money is dictating whether we can celebrate Patrick's Day now.
"It is a blow to the local community. What is the point in having a national holiday if local communities cannot celebrate it?"
A spokeswoman for the town council said: "We have tried every avenue possible to stage the parade, but it just is not possible."
She said the council had sent 200 letters to would-be participants informing them of the move. She confirmed that the council's insurers would not even offer a quote for blanket cover for the event. And prospects of the parade's return next year look gloomy, with Mr Martin Long of the Irish Insurance Federation saying public liability premiums were unlikely to fall until the scale of awards and associated litigation costs were addressed.
"The liability insurance market is a massive loss-making market in Ireland and insurers are operating in a hostile commercial environment," he said.
"The market has been haemorrhaging massive losses in the last number of years where in 2001, insurers lost €75 million in the Irish liability insurance market and the evidence anecdotally is that there was no improvement last year."