This year’s St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin will have a record number of overseas participants, according to festival organisers.
With a theme of Great Things Happen When We Get Together, it will include a “people’s parade” with up to 8,000 participants from abroad. People living outside Ireland are being invited by the St Patrick’s Festival to apply for places online on a first-come, first-served basis. They will march ahead of the main performance section of the parade. There will also be limited places for Irish residents.
Annual favourites
The festival will run from March 14th-18th. It will include annual favourites such as traditional music, the festival céilí, a treasure hunt, a carnival and street theatre.
The I Love My City programme will display the work of established and emerging artists from a variety of disciplines.
The festival will help fuel the recovery of tourism in Dublin, which is “way out front” compared to other parts of the country, the chief executive of Fáilte Ireland said yesterday.
Speaking at a Dublin tourism briefing in Croke Park, Shaun Quinn said the key challenge would be to target overseas visitors as the domestic market would “at best remain static or contract”.
About four million overseas visitors came to Dublin last year. Dublin hotels recorded average room occupancy of more than 70 per cent, the highest rate since the downturn began. And more than 332 conference and corporate events were held in the city, worth almost €180 million.
The Gathering
A total of 545 events are planned for the city in 2013 as part of The Gathering Ireland, with many existing events being incorporated into it, Fáilte Ireland said, including the St Patrick’s Festival.
Mr Quinn said business tourism and events-based tourism seemed to be “fuelling a lot of the recovery in and around Dublin city”.
Taking into account the “Gathering effect”, tourism in the capital could see an increase of more than 5 per cent for 2013, he predicted.
“There is considerable interest from North America; if there was a concern around it, it would be that maybe some of the business originating from the US this year may be pulling from 2014,” Mr Quinn said. “But if the Gathering is in effect going to go into 2014, there is going to be a knock-on effect.”
Spend less
Mr Quinn said he was aware not every sector of tourism in the capital was doing as well as business and events. Irish families would probably still take trips, but would spend less, he said. Dublin had traditionally been “quite highly dependent on the British market”, but this had “softened considerably”.
