La Fheile Padraig

Hi from Ireland- The greeting above is missing it's fadas (accents) - can't figure out how to get them in, but it is Gaelic! St. Patrick's Day is a bank holiday here, so Dana was off! We went to the parade in Tralee and have quite a few pictures to show you. The parade is pretty low key, but we enjoyed it - especially the kids, as you'll see. It is interesting that adults are not nearly as in to wearing green here as they are in the US. A few wore Irish flags and hats, but mostly it's the kids who wear the green!

We also watched coverage on TV (RTE, the national radio/tv station) of parades across the country and world. The entire newscast (except sports, of course) was devoted to parade coverage! Some were much bigger than ours, and looked interesting, with political commentary floats, including one of Barack and Hillary duking it out. Also, they mentioned that the first St. Pat's parade in Beijing was held this year and was a success, though authorities changed the allowable marchers from 700 to 200. The theme of many parades was multicultural, so there were Nigerians, Poles, Brazilians, Kenyans, Chinese, etc - some very beautiful music and dancing. Ours (Tralee) was pretty eclectic, though perhaps the theme was safety as we had many ambulances, civil defense trucks, and fire brigades - including this smoke alarm, reminding you to check your batteries. It was next to an actual smoking house float and the fireman sprayed water at the crowd, which didn't make Dana happy for his camera!



We especially like the marching bands - they always have bagpipes and accordions. We didn't get a good one of the pipes, but I really like this one of squeeze boxes! Here are two of the bands that rode on floats - one a trad group with flute, fiddle, guitar and bodhran and one a sort of folk group - very good natured, as you see.







Next are several of the groups that marched - wanted you to see the beautiful colors, and that we have scouts, too! The Chernyobyl Children's Project is very big here - hundreds of kids come over for holidays, and the group has a very high profile in all public events. We thought their float was pretty. Educate Together is Yann's school - you've seen him many times on the blog, but he was sick and didn't march that day!










2 things we found funny: first, between floats and groups, look how the crowd filled in - we can't see how they managed to get the rest of the parade through!


And, a free-lance guy - we walked behind him as we were leaving and got a mouth full of bubbles - but he was enjoying himself!