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Pacy parade petrified by the cold

Lucy Medlycott, event organiser with Bui Bolg arts company experiences the coldest and fastest-moving St Patrick's Day Dublin parade.

Part of the Bui Bolg float in this year's Dublin parade.

17/03/2006: At 4am today, as most people were turning over for an extended St Patrick's Day snooze, alarms were ringing in over 100 homes in Co Wexford as the Bui Bolg gang got ready to travel to Dublin for the parade.

"The alarm went off very early. I walked out of my door about 5am so I'm wrecked now. We had a disaster this morning. When we got to Dublin and started putting the pageant together our two inflatable clouds ripped in the wind and had to be scrapped. This meant one of the lads had to leave the lorry at the start and come back for them at the end of the parade.

So our bride, the centre piece of the parade, who was supposed to be surrounded by clouds, was cloudless.

This year was definitely the fastest moving parade yet. Because we won the best pageant last year we were leading the floats but once we moved from the start the parade flew along, we were almost running to keep up. The pace was mad.

The Army Band took off at a fierce clip and we only managed to catch them on O'Connell St where the whole parade was stopped because the RTÉ cameras weren't ready, we were too early for the allocated broadcast time slot. It's the first time I can remember the parade stopping.

"This year was also definitely the coldest parade ever. Yesterday the lads had a snowball fight in the carpark when they were putting the floats together. It was raining while the 120 performers in our group got dressed and then it cleared off and it was dry for most of the route but we got hammered by hailstones just towards the end.

The girls who were holding up the bridal train were struggling because it kept filling up with hailstones. It was so heavy it dragged along the ground and got covered in horse shit, I guess that's the Lord Mayor's fault. We'll have to drop it in to the Beautiful Launderette to get it cleaned.

The atmosphere was brilliant but I am kind of relieved it is all over. Our performers were excellent . . . The Enniscorthy Dance Academy fox trotted the whole three miles in the hail but everyone is kind of wrecked now. Eighty of us went for burgers and chips to break-up the bus journey home.

And there's no time to relax. We're back in the office on Monday getting ready for our next performance on May 1st. Bring it on."

All dress rehearsals are over

13/03/2006: Our motley crew traipsed though howling wind and lashing rain yesterday afternoon for the final rehearsal for the big day.

It was Sunday afternoon when the boy racers of Wexford like to take their cars out for a fast spin through the usually deserted Whitemill Industrial Estate.

To their ultimate horror they were met with fifty seven-foot tall wedding characters wandering all over their race track. A plethora of bridesmaids and Gothic altar boys fussed about a very gorgeous bride dragging a 9 metre long train through the puddles.

The bride's Beehive wig got a tad windswept and it is dawning on us all that we are going to need a lot more hair clips as Friday's weather forecast for is for more of the same.

We wheeled out the flower stands followed by the giant trampoline which is decked out as a hotel table. On top of this the two Mother in Laws fall to fighting over one of their stripper boyfriend's. Bouncing from their feet to their back they were landing punches at a phenomenal rate. All social order has collapsed.

The stage in front of the inflatable chapel also got blown off in the wind leading to some hasty repairs.

Back in the workshop it is like the calm after the deluge... Frances is calmly putting costumes back on hangers and taking up some last minute hems.

Caoimhe and Emma are completing the flower arrangements, while Eddie is quietly losing his marbles as he frantically tries to complete the cast list.

Making sure we have enough strong men to push floats is proving a difficult task, but then again if Eddie can't do it.... no one can.

We have already had to book an extra bus just to bring the cast from Wexford up to Dublin for the day. Colm is desperately trying to motivate everyone to finish the floats on time.

Cecile and Sandra, our European Union work placement students, are struggling to follow what is about to happen and gradually coming to terms with the fact that everything we have been doing for the last three months has been just a precursor to this one day.

I keep telling myself we will be ready.

Puppets, puppets everywhere

09/03/2006: "Frances White and Teresa Young are sewing furiously. They have wedding outfits to make for over 60 guests at our 'wedding' for the St Patrick's Day parade. Costumes for the bride and groom, their parents and all the other guests are being made.

Yards and yards and yards of material are needed. At the last minute we realised that we had run out of pink tulle netting for the wedding cake and Emma has been dispatched to Dublin with Eddie Milborne our choreographer. Eddie is going to Dublin for a rehearsal at Dublin City University tonight. The big rehearsal is down here on Sunday night.

There are 120 people taking part in our production this year, including Irish dancers from the Oylegate Irish dancing school and the Enniscorthy Dance Academy of Ballroom.

I spent most of yesterday chasing down rain coats for the Irish dancers. Their costumes cost a fortune. They are made out of gaberdine and are worth about €3,000.

We are also praying it won't be too windy. Our Puppets are over 7 feet tall and are balanced on the shoulders of our volunteers so if it's windy it's really difficult to maneuver. The worst spot is O'Connell bridge with the wind whipping down the Liffey.

With less than a week to go we're pretty much on schedule, fingers crossed, although none of us will get a moment off between now and the parade.

Hopefully by then Eddie's chest will have recovered. He is allergic to latex and had a bad reaction when one of the lads was spraying it on one of the floats. He does our pre-parade pep talk so we are all hoping his chest recovers."

A car is sacrificed for St Patrick's Day

" 07/03/2006: The boys - our 'engineering' team, have broken the back windscreen and ripped off the front bumper from my old Nissan Primera. I was in tears. . . . it was a much loved car.

They were trying to customise it for its new and important role in this year's parade and it has now been converted in to a chapel for the wedding .... except this chapel is going up in flames.

To explain - this year's St Patricks Day Parade was given the theme of Wishful Thinking. And as you have probably guessed by now, this year's pageant from Bui Bolg is based around a typical Irish wedding.

We have called it 'Our Perfect Day'. The first Section is the dream, every girl's fantasy of this special occasion and the second section is the Harsh Reality. This is where the burning Chapel comes in, along with a collapsing wedding cake!

The Volvo truck which has to transport all the props and costumes and puppets to Dublin for the St Patrick's Day parade has been awaiting its MOT for quite some time now . . . I am not even going to tell you how long.

The truck is finally going to sit the test this week (a fate worse than death... certainly more costly). Our mechanic has been putting off this job for as long as possible because some major surgery has to be performed but he assures us it will be ready for St Patrick's Day.

The other part of our fleet is a Ford Transit which we are transforming into the largest inflatable wedding cake you will ever see. It will stand over 40 feet tall.

How is it going to go under the Luas Lines I hear you ask? Well it deflates, in 20 seconds. We've timed it here.

We design and pattern draft all the inflatables ourselves. This is another one of the great Colm Lowneys talents, while Frances White sews them up. You cannot imagine how many yards of fabric went into that cake! It's a lot of sewing!!"

Lucy Medlycott

Bui Bolg


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