Montreal St. Patrick’s Day Parade turns 200 on Sunday

Irish dancers have always been a fixture of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Montreal. (UISM)

For two centuries, Montreal has celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a parade.

This weekend marks 200th edition of the parade and organizers are gearing up for the around 120 groups and some 3,000 participants.

On Sunday, Danny Doyle will wear the grand marshal sash.

“My father brought us up to be proud to be Irish, Canadian-Irish,” said the Erin Sports Association president. “I actually went to visit my mother, [and] told her. She’s 98 years old. We both cried for 20 minutes.”

Doyle will lead the longest-running parade of its kind in Canada that started in 1824.

United Irish Societies of Montreal (UISM) historian Ken Quinn said the event highlight’s the city’s rich Irish history.

“The Shamrock is on the City of Montreal flag, but we’d like to remind people that there’s there’s more to us than just the shamrock on the flag,” said Quinn.

The UISM took over the parade in 1928 and have been organizing it ever since.

The parade was cancelled twice during the COVID-19 pandemic and restarted in 2022 with a much more muted affair featuring no floats.

“We angered a lot of people, but it was important for us as a community to just parade amongst ourselves as much as possible,” said Quinn, adding that it felt like organizers were taking the parade back to its roots.

Originally, it was a Catholic procession. Then, floats were added, and secular groups soon overtook the presence in the parade and the influence of the church is no longer there, said Quinn.

“With the quiet revolution and the decline of the influence of the church, there are less and less Catholic parishes in the parade and more and more multicultural and community groups,” he said.

The parade features Irish dancers, entertainment and well-known faces, including personalities from CTV News and its predecessors.

This year, the parade will run down De Maisonneuve Avenue from noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday.

Attendance typically ranges from 250,000 to 500,000 people.

“It all depends on the weather,” said Quinn. “We’ve had years like 2012 where the weather was 23 degrees Celsius. There were a lot of people on the street that day.”