St Patrick's Day 1999

Robin Livingstone

Editor Andersonstown News

August 1998

This year the St Patrick's Day Parade went into Belfast City centre. A massive crowd of around 40-60,000 thronged into the streets around the city hall, previously the bastion of Ian Paisley-led loyalist gatherings. Bands played, people laughed and danced. Face-painted children in their St Patrick's finest watched street entertainers from their father's shoulders. It was a fantastic day. I was so proud to be there with my own daughter on my shoulders in her green and white ribbons.

Writing in The Scotsman about the parade, Malachi O'Doherty saw it all differently. I should point out that Malachi used to live in Riverdale – I live in Riverdale now. There the similarity ends. "Much of Belfast did not know where to look when the Catholics came to town," he wrote. "Just as the office workers were coming out to do their lunchtime shopping in Boots and Marks & Spencers, into the city filed this ragtag parade of the poor... these people are physically different from the people with jobs and good clothes. They are paler and skinnier and they talk in coarser accents that professional people lose."

Sadly, the Scotsman picture editor hadn't consulted with Malachi and illustrated the piece with a lovely, vibrant, full-colour picture totally devoid of the pasty-faced, malnourished troglodytes who ruined Malachi's day. Far from it: the people in the picture were the people I spent the day with: smiling and laughing; old and young; turned out in their spring best and, well... beautiful. Perhaps if the picture editor had consulted Malachi, he would have been able to supply an illustration which suited his thesis better: the rickets ward in the RVH circa 1927, for instance. It's clear that while the bad old press days haven't gone away for good, they don't come as frequently. We have ourselves to thank for that.