Wet Weather Does Not Dampen Spirits at St. Patrick’s Day Parade

There was a little bit of everything surrounding the 264th St. Patrick’s Day parade on March 17.

It kicked off with an early-morning breakfast that Mayor Eric Adams hosted at Gracie Manson while the parade’s grand marshal, Michael Anthony Benn, held forth at the Pig N’ Whistle. Benn, a retired carpenter has been running the Rockaway Beach St. Patrick’s Day parade for over 20 years, and in a city that has an abundance of parades to celebrate the patron saint of Ireland and the Archdiocese of New York, the Rockaway parade has emerged as the second-biggest in the city. The big parade in Manhattan, of course, is widely billed as the largest parade in the nation.

The reigning Rose of Tralee, Keely O’Grady, said there were 50 “Roses” from around the globe ready to march in this year’s parade. “We just came from the Chicago parade, but I’m sure they have nothing on New York,” said O’Grady, who was hanging with the Florida Rose, Maureen Ronan. O’Grady hails from New Zealand and was in New York for only the second time in her life, and her first parade here.

Adams, donning a bright-green tie and a cap that the Irish call a “scoop,” predicted there would be 2 million spectators and 150,000 despite what he called the “Irish sunshine” in the form of a drizzly rain to start the day. Most observers, however, felt the crowd was a little lighter than in past years. Adams recalled a day when the trade unions were largely Irish and they built many of the bridges and tunnels and the Empire State Building, which Adams pointed out “took only a year to build” from groundbreaking to completion of the 102-story skyscraper. [Full disclosure: The EICs grandfather John J. Kelly Sr. was a bricklayer on the Empire State Building.]

The current Tanaiste Simon Harris (which is the No. 2 person in the Irish government, behind the Taoiseach, Micheal Martin) made it to the mayor’s bash and noted, “New York City, more than any other, has always been a chosen city for the Irish.”

Also in the crowd at Gracie Mansion was Catherine Hallahan, who is a dentist by trade in Ireland but said she is working as a producer to bring a production called On Raglan Road to the United States. “I’m going to be a hot property in a few years’ time,” she said. She already had a brief brush with fame during the 2020 presidential election when she displayed a huge picture of Joe Biden in a shop window in one of his ancestral homelands in Ballina, County Mayo. “I made the front page of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal,” she said, flicking the images on her iPhone.

Adams skipped the Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral later that morning.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan celebrated Mass before a packed house of 2,400 people, reminding everyone that at its core St. Patrick’s Day is a religious celebration. Archbishop Eamon Martin, the primate of All Ireland, flew in for the celebration and delivered the homily and said he considered himself to be a “pilgrim of peace” much as was the original St. Patrick, the patron saint of his adopted home country as well as the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He said he had visited Washington, DC, this past weekend and took a contingent of secondary-school kids from St. Paul’s School in Armagh to the Ground Zero memorial. One of the kids at the memorial asked him, “Could it happen again?” He said it is important to cling to hope even in times of peril. “We need to be fearless ambassadors for peace and reconciliation,” he said.

And no Irish gathering would be complete without some political intrigues. The biggest hot ticket on that front probably belonged to the Lexington Democratic Club, which drew a host of heavy politicos to its pre-parade breakfast, including Congressman Jerry Nadler; Governor Kathy Hochul, who told the crowd that her maternal grandparents were from County Kerry; and Attorney General Letitia James. “I’m Letitia O’Jameson today,” she said. And she added that “Ireland is a very stable democracy.” Office-seekers Scott Stringer (for mayor) and Council Member Keith Powers (for Manhattan borough president) and incumbent Borough President Mark Levine (seeking City Comptroller) were on hand, along with East Side Assembly Member Alex Bores (“I’m not running for anything”).

Vanessa Aronson, who is running to succeed Keith Powers, is the past president of the Lexington Dem Club, but that did not stop her hobnobbing with friendly rivals Faith Bondy and Virginia Maloney, who are also competing for Powers’ soon to be vacated seat in the Dem primary in June.

Nadler delivered a rather stark political message to the throng, noting that the Trump administration defied a federal judge’s order to halt the deportation of about 250 migrants to El Salvador under the seldom-invoked Alien Enemies Act. A Judger had issued a verbal order for the deportations to stop. “This nation has not witnessed such an assault on the rule of law since the Civil War, when our democratic institutions were put to their ultimate test,” Nadler said. And on that cheery note wished everyone a “happy St. Patrick’s Day.” Later in the day, Nadler issued a blistering condemnation of the Administration’s move.

The parade added a new twist with the Grand Marshal blowing a whistle a few blocks away from Fifth Avenue in Times Square to start the parade, which of course in typical Irish fashion meant it started late.

Joining Michael Benn at the start of the parade was the NYPD and the US Army’s Fighting 69th Regiment, at one point an all-Irish regiment in the Civil War, but now a very integrated National Guard regiment that is headquartered out of an armory on Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. They were led up Fifth Avenue by two huge Irish wolfhounds named Siobhan and Mo Ghile Mear, mascots of the Fighting 69th.

And as always, one of the hardiest cheers of the day went to the FDNY, with firefighters carrying 343 flags to commemorate the FDNY members who died on 9/11, followed by a contingent of Families of the Fallen, where many relatives who had loved ones who died since paraded.

And of course Irish pubs and restaurants across the city were packed with revelers, even if not quite as abundant as a weekend celebration.