St. Pat’s festivities kick off amid tensions in the US

Associated Press

NEW YORK

St. Patrick’s Day festivities were in full swing Sunday with bagpipes and beer, but political tensions lingered in the northeastern U.S., 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 that would have allowed a gay group to march.

Still, thousands of green-clad spectators came out for the parade in Boston to watch bagpipers, and organizers of a float intended to promote diversity threw Mardi Gras-type beads at onlookers. A similar scene played out in Philadelphia.

In Georgia, the dome of Savannah’s City Hall will be lit green, and thousands braved temperatures in the teens Sunday to march with 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 today’s parade in Dublin, said.

Ireland’s head of government, Enda Kenny, became the first Irish prime minister to attend Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast Sunday.

But Kenny has resisted pressure to support the gay-rights lobby’s demand to have equal rights to parade on St. Patrick’s Day, and he planned to march today in New York.

Parade organizers have said gay groups are not prohibited from marching, but are not allowed to carry gay-friendly signs or identify themselves as LGBT.

Some LGBT groups were to protest the parade along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue today. Others had planned to dump Guinness beer from the shelves of the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the gay-rights movement, in protest of the brewer’s plan to sponsor the parade, but that demonstration was canceled late Sunday after Guinness said it had dropped its sponsorship.

Other beer companies joined the boycotts, with Sam Adams withdrawing its sponsorship of Boston’s parade and Heineken following suit in New York.