WEARING THE GREEN
As part of an Irish tourism push, several world landmarks will be bathed in green floodlights for St. Patrick’s day. Among them:
• Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland Paris.
• The Moulin Rouge nightclub, also in Paris.
•The Petrin Lookout Tower in Prague.
• Rhine Falls near Zurich.
• The Taj Mahal in India.
• The London Eye Ferris wheel.
• Niagara Falls.
• The Las Vegas welcome sign.
• New York City’s Empire State Building
• The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.
• Sydney Opera House in Australia.
• The Giza pyramids and the Sphinx in Egypt.
St. Patrick’s Day festivities were in full swing Sunday with the usual merriment of bagpipes and beer, but political tensions lingered in the Northeast, where city leaders will be conspicuously absent from parades over gay rights issues.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio will become the first mayor in decades to sit out the traditional march today because parade organizers refuse to let participants carry pro-gay signs. Boston Mayor Martin Walsh wasn’t marching in his city’s parade Sunday, either, after talks broke down over allowing a gay group to march.
Still, thousands of green-clad spectators came out for the parade in Boston and a similar scene played out in downtown Philadelphia. And several thousand people braved temperatures in the teens to march with pipe and drum bands in Detroit and Bay City, Mich.
In Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day provides the launch of the country’s annual push for tourism, a big part of the rural economy.
“To Irish people by birth or descent, wherever they may be in the world, and to those who simply consider themselves to be friends of Ireland, I wish each and every one of you a happy, peaceful and authentically Irish St. Patrick’s Day,” Irish President Michael D. Higgins, the ceremonial head of state and guest of honor at Monday’s parade in Dublin, said in a statement.
Ireland’s head of government, Enda Kenny, became the first Irish prime minister to attend Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast on Sunday. Kenny has resisted pressure, in both Ireland and America, to support the gay rights lobby’s demand to participate in St. Patrick’s Day parades, and he plans to march today in New York.
“The St. Patrick’s Day parade (in New York) is a parade about our Irishness and not about sexuality, and I would be happy to participate in it,” he said in Dublin before leaving for a six-day trip to the U.S.
Parade organizers have said gay groups are not prohibited from marching, but are not allowed to carry gay-friendly signs or identify themselves.
Some groups plan to protest the parade along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenuetoday. Others will gather at the city’s historic Stonewall Inn, where the gay rights movement was born, to dump Guinness beer from its shelves in protest of the beer company’s parade sponsorship.
Other beer companies have joined the boycotts, with Sam Adams withdrawing its sponsorship of Boston’s parade and Heineken following suit in New York.
New York’s parade, a tradition that predates the city itself, draws more than 1 million spectators and about 200,000 participants every March 17. It has long been a mandatory stop on the city’s political trail, and will include marching bands, traditional Irish dancers and thousands of uniformed city workers.
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