NEW YORK — Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar joined along as Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue came alive with the sound of bagpipes, trumpets and lots of green Saturday at the 257th running of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Several bagpipe bands led a parade made up of more than 100 marching bands after Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke briefly, calling it a “day of inclusion” and adding: “We’re all immigrants.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, marched with police Commissioner James O’Neill under sunny skies.
Varadkar, Ireland’s first openly gay leader, watched the parade at St. Patrick’s Cathedral before joining the march. In remarks, Cuomo said it was “my pleasure to march with him,” especially in a parade that long tried to ban gays.
The parade, beginning at 11 a.m., lasted nearly six hours. An estimated 150,000 marchers made the 1.4-mile trek past Central Park, the Cathedral and Trump Tower.
Large since the mid-1800s, the parade has celebrated Irish culture and Irish immigrants, who once faced nativist calls for their exclusion from the workforce — and from the country — when they began arriving in the city in huge numbers during the Irish Famine.
In the 1990s, parade organizers were involved in annual court fights over whether to exclude openly gay groups from the march. This year, at least two groups in the parade had banners identifying marchers as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.
For the 167th time, the lead group marching in the parade was 800 members of the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry Regiment, of the New York Army National Guard. Cuomo joined them. The regiment, once predominantly made up of Irish immigrants, first led the parade in 1851 as a deterrent to anti-immigrant violence.