Chinese authorities nervous about parade

Maybe the Chinese were right to be uneasy about plans to hold Beijing's first St Patrick's Day parade. Even I felt a little uncomfortable about all the diddly-aye music and the jigging girls with their hair in ringlets in the middle of China's capital.
Public gatherings have never been encouraged here and the prospect of a mass procession down the city's main pedestrianised shopping street - Wangfujing Lu - caused a minor panic among officials.
The Irish embassy was warned that there should be no more than 200 people at the first annual green fest, but in the end, there were several times this number. There must have been at least 200 young, frowning police officers rushing around trying to impose some kind of order on proceedings.
In the end, our Minister of European Affairs, Dick Roche, led what must have been the briefest march in the history of Paddy's Day parades. [Surely he should have been in Brussels or seat of the current EU Presidency, Llubljana.]
The short procession strolled about 150 yards from The Foreign Langauges Bookstore to the Oriental Plaza, before doing a loop, retracing its steps and calling it a day.
I found myself escaping through the human cordon where I took many a pic of our 'European' Minister smiling gamely while talking through gritted teeth.
I couldn't very well skip back out of the parade at that stage, so I joined the lads from Christian Brothers College, Cork, and acted the langer so nobody suspected a thing.
The lads from Cork must have been pleased to hear they'd be spending a week in the heart of 'The People's Republic', although some were surely surprised to find that didn't mean St Patrick's Street.
Just because the parade was kept short, didn't mean that the festivities would be curtailed. There was Oirish dancing and trad music blaring out of speakers as bemused Chinese shoppers wondered how their Sunday shopping spree had been hijacked by girls in velvet emerald dresses and boisterous lads in leprechaun hats.
Meanwhile, things were a little different on the streets of Tibet where Lhasa was under lockdown. But we won't ruin our fun by mentioning such awkward political issues - or so said Minister Roche when quizzed by RTE...