Old friends have a holiday as parade takes a new turn

This modernised St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin was all very well, but you couldn't help feeling a bit nostalgic for absent friends.

Rain, a regular feature of March 17th for as long as many people could remember, was nowhere to be seen yesterday. Likewise, there was no show by that well-loved double act, sleet and hailstones, which for years had made the parade such a memorable experience for visitors from warm countries.

Arguably the most poignant absentee, however, was the sub-zero wind-chill factor, which hadn't missed a St Patrick's Day this century and which had long carried responsibility for raising the traditional Himalayan-sized goose pimples on the legs of visiting US majorettes.

But the sad truth is that none of these veterans fit in with the organisers' plans to turn the occasion into a Caribbean festival, and there's no room for sentiment in this business. So yesterday's event instead featured genetically modified St Patrick's Day weather to suit the entertainment.

The balmy conditions brought record numbers onto the streets, especially children, and this created its own problems. Say what you like about the old-style weather, but at least it was a form of crowd control.

Yesterday, traffic was buggy-to-buggy on all roads into the city, and when it was most needed, AA Roadwatch was nowhere to be seen. There were buggy jams at every major intersection, as the realisation only slowly dawned that movement on the footpaths adjoining the parade route was impossible.

Joy it was to be alive in the conditions, but to be young was downright dangerous. On a footpath at Christchurch Place, for instance, hundreds of people converging from opposite directions and trying to negotiate a non-existent passageway were being warned: "There's no way through - there's two buggies side-by-side in there". Unfortunately, by the time they heard this, there was no way back either.

The scene was replicated in many other places; and considering that many of the adults on the footpaths could only catch a glimpse of the taller floats, you had to wonder how much the children in buggies saw.

That's one of the problems with the Dublin parade - the venue's just not suitable. If the warm-weather experiment continues, they may have to consider moving the whole thing to a greenfield site next year.

But the claustrophobic conditions on the footpaths were at least a way of bringing people together, which is one of the points of the exercise. Strangers who wouldn't normally offer each other the sign of peace were being forced into near-carnal relations in their attempts to move from one point to another.

It took this reporter an hour and a half to get around the fringes of the parade from Westmoreland Street to its source at St Stephen's Green, arriving there just in time to see the last float - a very shaggy St Patrick - depart. "Good luck," he told the saint wearily, and took the short cut back through the Green.

Even here, though, the crush of people through the gates was so great gardai had to institute a temporary one-way system to ease the pressure at the Grafton Street corner.

Back at College Green, surrounded by the debris of the now passed parade, Wilmer Ardis from Newtownhamilton, Co Armagh, was preaching the Word of God through a hand-held speaker.

A regular evangelical visitor to Dublin, he couldn't come last weekend because of illness, but the prospect of reaching half a million souls in Dublin on St Patrick's Day was too much: "I got on the bus yesterday and said: `Live or die Lord, I'm goin' on to Dublin.' "

On his opinion of the parade, he pleaded discretion. "I wouldn't want to say anything about that, for it might sound harsh. But one man said to me: `Wilmer, you're the only man talkin' about St Patrick here - all the rest is idolatry.' "