Subdued St Patrick's Day for the Irish

DUBLIN - Ireland's usually boisterous St Patrick's Day turned as limp as sodden shamrock yesterday as organisers called off nationwide parades to keep the threat of foot-and-mouth disease away from its shores.

"Shamrock, shamrock," cried 70-year-old Agnes Kelly, her voice echoing across Dublin's plush Grafton St, selling lapel sprigs of the three-leafed national emblem as her mother did before her.

"I feel a little bit sad, because there's no parade," she said.

While the sons and daughters of the Irish diaspora across the globe celebrated the national patron, there was little "jiggin' and jarrin"' at home - well, not until night-time anyway, when the shamrock was well and truly "drowned."

Fears of foot-and-mouth, the highly contagious disease that has ravaged Britain's livestock and spread to France, forced the Irish to put their national day on ice.

The main event, Dublin's St Patrick's Day parade and four-day carnival extravaganza, was postponed.

The carnival usually generates up to 35 million Irish pounds ($96.1 million) for hoteliers and restaurateurs alone. Normally some 550,000 people throng the streets for the two-hour parade.

The streets were unusually quiet early on. "It's a bit weird," said one police officer.

This year the feast day brought signs of new warmth in British-Irish relations that have improved steadily in line with Northern Ireland's burgeoning peace process.

The Queen sent her first-ever St Patrick's Day message to Ireland.

Across the Atlantic, Irish sweaters, tweed caps and all things green were the order of the day as the day was celebrated in cities around the United States.

In Savannah, Georgia, thousands of green-garbed revellers packed the grassy squares to watch the nation's second-largest St Patrick's parade after a breakfast of Bloody Marys and beer.

At the nation's biggest parade, in New York, it was a mayor's last St Patrick's Day Parade and a cardinal's first, when more than one million spectators watched 165,000 pairs of feet march up Fifth Avenue.

For Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, it was a farewell love-fest in green.

"Rudy! Rudy! We love you baby," yelled one group of adoring fans minutes after the mayor greeted newly installed Cardinal Edward Egan in front of St Patrick's Cathedral.

Boston warmed up for its activities with corned beef and cabbage breakfasts, a dog show for Irish setters, and an Irish coffee competition judged by the mayor.

- AGENCIES