PARADES

Waterford City's 2011 St Patrick's Day Parade
Thursday, 17th March from 11 am.

The theme of Waterford City’s 2011 St Patrick’s Day Parade will celebrate the return of the Tall Ships Race to Waterford and will be led by a Guest Grand Marshall.  Past Grand Marshalls have included Keith Barry, Val Doonican, Anna Manahan and Brendan Bowyer who were all born in Waterford. Each year in addition to the annual St Patrick’s Day Parade, there is a feast of free entertainment in the City with a line up of Irish bands playing in John Roberts Square after the parade.  The Waterford Craft & Food Market also serves up its usual delights on this day. 

Waterford City was the first City to declare St Patrick’s Day a national holiday.  In 1903 Waterford Corporation declared that St Patrick’s Day should be a general holiday throughout the City and to entirely suspend business that day.  Before this St Patrick’s Day was not a national holiday in Ireland.  Although the feast of St Patrick had been celebrated since medieval times especially by the Franciscans, it was not until the mid-seventeenth century that the 17th or March became a holiday of obligation in the Catholic Church.  When the Waterford born Franciscan Luke Wadding was appointed to the Congregation of the Breviary in Rome he included St Patrick’s Day among the official saints days for the first time