Dry weather welcomes successful parade

THERE was a good turnout for last Sunday’s St Patrick’s Day parade, which was met with welcome dry weather.

Councillor Vincent Coleman was charged with making preparation for the event and he was pleased with how things went.

“There was a very good turn out for it, we were very impressed. There were over 30 groups taking part and it went off well. The crowd was probably busier than last year. I was delighted with my first time being involved and the councillors and a lot of other people gave me help.”

Prize-winning entries on the day included the Morrocan Irish Association, the Shannon Christian Church and the Shannon Filipino Community.

He said Shannon had got behind the parade with a lot of local entries.

“All the local community groups were represented very well and the weather held up for us, you couldn’t ask for much more. It went very well, in fairness. We had three brass bands, the CBS, Boherbue and the Ennis Brass Band.”

Following the parade there was family entertainment in SkyCourt, with facepainting, traditional music and Irish dancing.

“It wouldn’t be a success without the community and we’re grateful to everyone who helped and who took part in the parade,” Councillor Coleman added.

Olive Carey was grand marshal for the parade and she said she was delighted to have been asked.

“First of all it was a great honour to be selected as Grand Marshall and I was very excited about it. There was a great turnout on the day. It was a bit daunting but I was very proud to represent the heritage organisations in Shannon, Dúchas na Sionna and the Shannon Archaeological and Historical Society.

“I was really proud and people from those organisations were walking behind with a banner showing images of some of the projects that we are involved in. I was very proud to represent the organisations and hopefully to raise their profile a little bit.”

She has been working on the preparation of a social history of Shannon for some time now and she said a good deal of progress has been made. “We’re working on that and it’s taking a while, but it’s important to get it right. We’ve been recording the stories of people who came to Shannon in the very early, also of people who were living in the area before the town grew. We’re just coming to the end of that phase of collecting the stories. I felt it was very important to transcribe them verbatim so they’d be in the archives. The next thing is to extract the themes and set them in the context of the history of Shannon.”

She also said that a lot of work has been done on preserving Hastings Cottage and that it is intended to open a heritage garden there, which would be permanenty open to the public.