Wednesday, March 17, 2010

St Patrick's Day Parade, Belfast

I've been a fan of the Twelve Five's website where Iain Anderson occasionally posts minute-long videos - twelve shots, five seconds each. While not as beautiful and well crafted as Iain's output, here's the Belfast St Patrick's Day parade as a Twelve Fives.

It was the first time in my life I'd been down to see the parade. Shorter than I expected. Absolutely no contentious symbols or flags in the parade. It was good to see a wider than normal variety of Belfast councillors marching in front of the parade. UTV's Paul Clark interviewed PUP councillor John Kyle (1 minute into the clip) who joined this year's parade. The only unionist councillor participating, John explained:

"I think it's an opportunity for both communities to come together to do something constructive that really promotes Northern Ireland."

Not so hopeful to hear the drunken lads shouting IRA chants at the top of their voices on Fountain Street and saying they were "goin' to the Holylands to start it off".

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for posting this, I kinda wanted to head into town for it and besides the downsides it still looks like it was fun. I sadly didn't make it in the end, I only just made it out of bed an hour or so after it had started, needed the recovery from work :(

Niall said...

We made it in for the 3rd year running (well, second year for me; 3rd for the rest of the crew). It felt a lot shorter this year than last, but I suspect this is because there were far fewer "community groups" who hadn't made any effort to look like they were in a parade.

My personal positive highlight was the special Olympians who got a fantastic reception.

On the flip side, in the middle of one of the community groups was a lady pushing a pram with one hand and talking loudly on the phone with the other. I couldn't decide if she wasn't that interested in the parade, or if she was actually an actress giving a more contemporaneous interpretation of Irish culture ...

(PS we were about 100 yards away from you on Chichester St!)

Alan in Belfast (Alan Meban) said...

Small world - we probably walked past each other at some stage. It was a lot shorter than I had expected.