The three day St Patrick’s festival takes place on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th of March and parade day Wednesday, 17th March. This year’s theme is Ships to Shore – celebrating Cork’s maritime culture.
Join us for three days of festival madness as the street bursts into life with FREE family-fun entertainment including music, circus walkabouts and children’s workshops in the City Centre. There is something for the young and young-at-heart too. Take a trip down Grand Parade and sample some tasty titbits from the Barry’s Tea Market as you kick-back to enjoy the music including everything from Trad, Jive, Soul or Bluegrass. Watch the comedy antics of circus workabouts or get making in a children’s workshop.
The Barry’s Tea Food Market which takes place on the Grand Parade and boardwalk on South Mall across the three days is open from 10am to 6pm and will feature up to 40 stalls of locally produced food and craft. Participants include the Douglas based cup cake company www. cupcake.ie , an artisan gourmet pizza company Volcano’s Pizza and hand crafted natural cosmetics from the Naked Soap Company.
There is a programme of street performers which is sure to delight kids and families especially the baby cycling Panda, the Clucking Fantastic Crowd Control Chickens and Chapeau Magique a magicians act all the way from France with his spectacular folding paper workshops that generate hundreds of large scale paper hats.
There will be a combination of outdoor musical performances on the main stage adjacent to Nano Nagle Bridge as well as acoustic performances thoughout the market. These include The Roaring Forties, a jump jive swing band, The Red Herrings an American blues band as well as popular Irish Traditional bands such as The Ceili All Stars.
The Cork St. Patrick’s Festival parade on Wednesday, 17th of March kicks off at 1pm, from the top of South Mall at Parnell place and will travel down South Mall onto the Grand Parade, winding around St. Patrick’s Street and finishing at the end of Merchant’s Quay. The Grand Marshall of the parade this year is Cork native Lisa Cummins, the first Irish person to swim the English Channel both ways
See the festival website here or download the programme of events here. (pdf)
