Saint Patrick's Day Is Here Again!

And so we are into March again and I for one am all excited about the huge party and celebrations planned by Belfast City Council, (BCC) for Saint Patrick’s Day. This year BCC have exceeded even my wildest dreams with a packed programme of Celtic-themed events that the whole family can enjoy.

The big day begins with a magnificent, colourful parade through the city with floats depicting all aspects of Irish culture and history. Bands will play traditional Irish music as they wind their way through the city streets to Sailortown, (Cathedral Quarter), where Irish legends, The Chieftains will headline a free concert for all the people of the city. Other acts booked to perform are The O’Toole School of Irish Dancing and the Irish Women’s Holy Choir. It should be an amazing day, show-casing all that is positive and good about our Irish culture.

BCC have even offered to remove the Union Jack from Belfast's city hall for the day, in a gesture of friendship and mutual respect. Credit where credit is due, I say.

The celebrations of the biggest day in Ireland’s calendar will begin at midday and will continue on into the wee small hours so get plenty of sleep the night before because, both BBC and UTV will cover the entire event live and will show highlights on both channels later that evening. I’m sure you will want to see yourself and your delighted kids on television, enjoying the wonderful family day of fun and frolic.

Um, er, um, er, I may have got a tiny bit mixed up in some of the details of my previous paragraphs. Belfast City Council have booked a 19 year old hip hop rapper from London as the star act. His speciality (whoever he is) is the Grime form of rap, so that should be sort of, er, good. A never-before heard of Romanian band will also perform a form of music that I am sure we will all appreciate also. It's good to be inclusive and exposed to new things, so that's, um, good too.

The Union Jack will continue to fly illegally on the big day but, Irish tricolours are prohibited at the parade as are Irish shirts or hats or anything else that might infer anything Irish. The world-wide tradition of celebrating Irishness on Saint Patrick's Day will not be the case in this part of Ireland. Instead, the theme has been changed to "Spring" and there is a promise of lots of spring flowers and "Huge Butterflies" in the carnival parade.

There will also be a patronising concert at the Waterfront Hall that evening for those that know their place and know how to behave. These people would be outraged to the point of tutting or possibly writing a letter of complaint to the Daily Trumpet, if they didn’t get at least a free gig that night, away from the unwashed riff raff.

The PSNI have promised to keep to their tradition of providing an annual riot in the Holy Lands, where they will arrive heavy-handed in body armour and with attack-dogs to force Irish students off the streets. No loud Irish music or celebration of any kind will be tolerated in their own area and the students will be blamed for being drunk and noisy in the first place.

(Hmmm? I wonder why the drunken hoards that line the public route and leave the streets knee deep in urine; vomit, discarded food and packaging; condoms, used syringes, and empty alcohol cans and bottles every year on the Twelfth of July, never face this treatment? The PSNI are happy to stand among them to chat and watch as the Glorious Twelfth is celebrated with deafening music and a certain form of dancing all day and into the night. They will stand and warm their hands at the flaming bonfires topped with Irish tricolours and which pollute the air and destroy the roads and everything else they touch. The full resources of BCC are brought to bear to clean it all up very quickly, as soon as the drunks fall into bed. Maybe if the Irish students left their own area; rioted a bit more ferociously and caused lots more damage, then they would be appeased with grants and free fireworks from the city council too)!

So I hope that clears up the few, slight discrepancies I may have made initially. I am sure we will all still feel great at the free and unfettered expression of our national identity on Ireland’s biggest day.

By-the-way, the application date has now passed for those artists wishing to apply to Belfast City Councils', Good Relations Partnership, for their `Irish History and Heritage` artwork project.

The council had invited artists to submit expressions of interest in the project. The completed artwork will be displayed this coming July, in Belfast City Hall, which reopened last October after an £11 million refurbishment programme.

While the theme of the new art work is `Irish History and Heritage`, the council stressed that it is open to interpretation and not prescriptive. "The budget for this commission is £20,000, which is inclusive of all fees and expenses, VAT, insurance, travel costs and cost of fabrication and installation". Did I mention the £11 million spent on the refurbishment?

Councillor Maire Hendron, (Alliance Party) Chairman, (Surely they meant Chairperson?) of Belfast City Council`s Good Relations Partnership, gushed enthusiastically, “I`m excited about this commission for a new piece of art for our wonderful building. This art work will contribute to making people feel this is truly a City Hall for all.”

So if you’re an Irish artist who can cut costs by creating your masterpiece from empty toilet-roll tubes and sticky-back plastic, in your back garden shed and be very careful not to cut yourself because you can’t afford insurance, then this might be for you. Utilising other bits and bobs that you might find lying around will also reduce costs.

You will have to limit the scale of the piece, due to tax and VAT and the cost of fabrication of your work. You will also need to take into account the cost of buying two unemployed and thirsty mates a few pints. They can help you lessen the travel costs of towing your work to the city hall and also to help nail it to one of the walls of the magnificent building before connecting and running the electric cable to a safe distance away, behind something concrete, before switching it on. Don't worry though - no one is expecting anything as grand as The Angel of the North!

After all that, you might actually have a few quid left for yourself. It will probably be best if there is nothing really too overtly Irish about the work so that it can blend in nicely with the UDR stained-glass windows and general British decor throughout. I can't wait to see the finished piece in it's highly visible position.

Finally on BCC, (for now) - Congratulations to Andersonstown News, (ATN) and North Belfast News, (NBN) for pointing out that BCC had been insulting the queen of England by flying the Union Jack upside down! A brand new flag was quickly turned the right way up and now flies in the face of us all just as illegally but, more correctly, than it did before.

Those silly olde city fathers had been looking a bit stupid really until The New Sinn Fein, newspaper staff got on the ball and got things turned round the right way again. Never let it be said that ATN and NBN are less than sycophantic protectors of their leaders beneath the dome.

Full marks to Mr. O' Muilleoir and friends for getting that quickly put right. I understand that they had some convincing to do but, they got it sorted out in the end. We wouldn't have wanted all those tourists continuing to take photographs to take home and show their friends, of such an oversight and insult to the British crown, now would we? So, well done you!