PHOTO ESSAY BY DONNA ACETO | This year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade up Fifth Avenue — the 255th such annual event — marked a welcome advent of unity in New York’s Irish-American community, since for the first time an Irish LGBT group was allowed to march behind its own banner, ending a 25-year ban that spawned a corresponding boycott.
Marching for the first time, Mayor Bill de Blasio actually traversed the route from 44th Street north to 79th Street twice — once with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, Bratton’s wife, Rikki Klieman, and First Lady Chirlane McCray, and later with the Lavender and Green Alliance, the LGBT group that drew at least 250 participants.
The grand marshal this year was former US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, a Maine Democrat. As President Bill Clinton’s US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, Mitchell is credited as the principal architect of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to that troubled British possession. From 1999 through 2009, Mitchell served as chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast. After leaving that post, he served President Barack Obama as US Special Envoy for the Middle East.
