Madam, — Your edition of March 18th reported as fact that 675,000 people turned out to see the St Patrick’s Day parade along the 2.5km route in Dublin.
Maybe it’s a result of the inflated house prices of the Tiger era, bankers’ bonuses or building society pensions, but we seem to have completely lost the meaning and value of numbers. To fit such a crowd would have required a depth of 68 people all along both sides of the route – a physical impossibility in the space available.
To put the number into context, the total published attendance – accurately counted – at all soccer matches in the English and Scottish leagues last Saturday was a mere 644,672. Another crowd of similar magnitude to the claimed parade attendance was at Pope John Paul II’s Mass in the Phoenix Park in 1979 when 1.2 million people were systematically arranged into 1,000-person corrals for control and safety. No such measures were in evidence last Tuesday.
Despite the astronomical attendance figures predicted and reported, the level of crowd control was in my view seriously inadequate. This was frighteningly apparent in College Green after the parade when a potentially dangerous crush developed among a few thousand people, incuding many children, due to opposing crowd flows coming from Dame Street and Westmoreland Street.
I would really like to know how the reported attendance was arrived at. My own estimate from watching the parade? Six rows, 10,000 people per row – 60,000 people. – Yours, etc,