An ‘all-inclusive’ alternative to New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade takes place in the city tomorrow
DESCRIBED BY the Irish- American writer Pete Hamill as a parade “with a purpose”, St Pat’s For All is now in its 10th year and takes place tomorrow in Queens, New York.
The Queens parade offers an alternative to the St Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan, which takes place on Fifth Avenue. Because of the exclusion of gay groups from the latter, for some Irish-Americans in New York, St Patrick’s Day has become more of a source of embarrassment than a point of celebration.
The Manhattan parade has seen some ugly scenes over the years as gay rights protesters clashed with the parade organisers, the Ancient Order of the Hibernians (AOH), a Catholic Irish-American fraternity. A Supreme Court ruling in 1995 found that, as a private group, the AOH could exclude whoever it wanted.
St Pat’s For All, however, describes itself an “inclusive” parade. Its website says that “this parade welcomes all to celebrate Irish heritage and culture regardless of race, gender, creed or sexual orientation”.
The parade organisers stress that theirs is not a gay pride parade. “Of course there are gay people in the parade,” says Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy, the parade co-chair. “But it is an Irish parade where everyone who wants to celebrate the Irish diaspora can join in.”
“The parade is a multicultural, multi-ethnic celebration of Ireland,” says Brendan Fay, also a co-chair. He points out that a group from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) will carry a banner of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist who visited Ireland on a lecture tour in 1845. And a group from the Mexican community will honour the San Patricios, a group of Irish immigrants who fought on the Mexican side during the US-Mexican war of 1846-1848.
To celebrate Barack Obama’s election, Stella O’Leary, the president of Irish-American Democrats, will speak at the parade. “It’s refreshing to know that there is an Irish group that is so inclusive,” says O’Leary. “I’ve been very impressed by all the ethnic groups involved.”
This year, the parade’s grand marshals are Terry George, the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter from Belfast, and Susan McKeown, a New York-based singer and songwriter originally from Dublin.
The Keltic Dreams, a group of Irish dancers from an elementary school in a poor neighbourhood of the Bronx, were one of the highlights at last year's St Pat's For All. The group, made up of African-American and Latino children, has performed on The Late Late Showand was the subject of a documentary shown on RTÉ. Led by Caroline Duggan, an Irish dancing teacher from Dublin, the group will perform again at tomorrow's parade.
Brendan Fay, a veteran gay rights campaigner, says he co-founded St Pat’s For All out of a sense of frustration at what was happening in Manhattan. “I remember telling a reporter years ago that there would be peace on the streets of Belfast before gays groups would be allowed to march down Fifth Avenue,” he says. He recalls getting a phone call from a woman from New Jersey whose gay son killed himself, thanking him for putting on a parade where people like her son could feel accepted.
A native of Drogheda, Fay
(who met his husband at mass and has two degrees in theology) was involved in the dispute between a now-defunct group called the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation and the Ancient Order of the Hibernians during the 1990s over gay groups marching in the Fifth Avenue parade. In 1991, following a complaint from a parent, he was fired from his job as a religion teacher at a Catholic girls’ high school in Queens. In 1993, while in Brooklyn, a teenager yelled an anti-gay slur at him and stabbed him in the right side of his back.
Organisers say marchers have been subjected to harassment over the years, although this has lessened in recent times. At the parade itself, there are always a handful of protesters who wave banners bearing legends such as “Shame” and “Sodomy”.One year, there was a gay man from Woodside, Queens, who was marching in the parade while his own mother was protesting on the sidewalk, waving a banner about the evils of homosexuality.
Some in the Irish-American community object to the use of “St Pat’s” in the parade title. “As the parade organisers boast, the march celebrates many religious, racial and ethnic groups, including a gay and lesbian contingent,” says Bill Donohue, the president of right-wing conservative organisation the Catholic League. “This is fine by me, but as such it should be renamed the Multicultural Parade: it obviously has nothing to do with St Patrick. If it did, it wouldn’t have a Methodist or NAACP contingent, any more than the Salute to Israel Parade would allow a Methodist or NAACP contingent.”
Matt Nelligan, the New York State President of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, says that while other St Patrick’s Day parades involve “public displays of Irish pride that everyone can buy into”, people should remember that “we don’t call it Irish-American cultural day, we call it St Patrick’s Day. And that’s in honour of a Catholic saint.”
However, Malachy McCourt, the writer (and brother of Frank), argues that the Fifth Avenue parade is “more of a religious procession than a parade”. McCourt, who was grand marshal at St Pat’s For All two years ago, says he will be in attendance at the Queens parade tomorrow.
“I will be strolling, rather than marching,” he adds.