Bring banners for your ancestors

Danny Boyle, Lyn Crumlish and Noreen Downes

ON MARCH 14, 2026, the Glasgow St Patrick’s Festival Parade will once again bring colour, music and life to the heart of the city. This year’s theme ‘A Celebration of Irish Immigration to Glasgow’ is more than a commemoration. It is a declaration of who we are, where we come from, and the immeasurable contribution our community has made to Glasgow for almost two centuries.

Our story

Our story in this city began not with ease, but with trauma. An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, forced hundreds of thousands of our ancestors to flee Ireland between 1840 and 1850. The inter-war and post war period saw another wave of economic migrants ready to rebuild infrastructure, fill the ranks of the emerging NHS and engage with pride in our education services for all.

Many of us are descended from those who arrived in Glasgow with little but courage, faith and a desperate need to survive. Our ancestors stepped onto the Broomielaw often exhausted, often grieving and changed the city forever.

Glasgow at that time was the ‘Second City of the Empire,’ built on global commerce, the Industrial Revolution and the wealth generated directly and indirectly through the transatlantic slave trade. Into this booming, but harsh industrial environment, came a vast population of impoverished Irish refugees. Their arrival fundamentally reshaped Glasgow’s social, cultural and economic identity.

We did not arrive quietly. We arrived in numbers, in hardship and in hope. Many of our ancestors spoke Irish Gaelic as their first language.

“You would hear more Irish spoken outside St John’s in the Gorbals Gaeltacht than you would back home in Annagry,” is a quote from BBC Broadcaster Billy Kay’s series first aired in 1980, Odyssey: Voices from Scotland’s Recent Past.

Yet our ancestors’ mother tongue was almost wiped out within a generation as prejudice, poverty and pressure forced assimilation. This cultural erasure should give us pause today. At a time when public debate around refugees and ‘economic migrants’ is as febrile as it has been in decades, we must remember that we are the descendants of such people. To forget that truth is to forget ourselves.

Our contribution

Yet despite adversity, discrimination and, at times, open hostility, we rebuilt, we worked, and we transformed Glasgow. Our contribution to Scotland is written into the very bones of the nation. We helped deliver the water supply, build the homes, roads and public buildings, and construct the post-war hydroelectric dam system that modernised the country. Our influence is felt every day in the NHS, education, construction, community work, politics, commerce and, more recently, green energy.

Our cultural impact is equally profound. Irish music, dance, language and song have survived because earlier generations carried them sometimes defiantly through decades when they were dismissed or derided. Every step danced and every note played in the 2026 parade honours those who preserved these traditions so that we could inherit them with pride.

In sport, our imprint is unmistakable. Celtic Football Club stands as one of the greatest expressions of diaspora identity anywhere in the world, born from the desire to relieve poverty and build community. In addition, the Irish who went to Edinburgh and Dundee established the sporting institutions of Hibernian and Dundee (Hibernian) United.

In traditional Irish music and sport the Comhaltas Branches and GAA clubs that flourish across Scotland, these volunteers and organisations echo from the past and remind us that when we arrived with little, we brought with us something priceless: organisation, solidarity and vision.

Our connection with Donegal and West Donegal remains an essential strand of our identity. The presence of the Rann na Feirste (Druma Mór) and Dobhar bands in the 2026 parade is not just ceremonial; it is a living musical ribbon tying generations of migration, return, friendship and shared heritage together.

Our celebration

But our celebration must be understood in the context of the present. Once again, in times of economic uncertainty and widening inequality, the same accusations once used against our ancestors are being turned towards others.

Racism and anti-immigrant sentiment do not concern themselves with legal status or generational depth. They target people. Pakistanis, Syrians, Indians, Africans, Poles, Roma, Scottish Gyspy Travellers and many more because they are perceived as different, often visibly so. The echoes of the past are growing louder, and we would be hypocrites not to recognise them.

So, we must ask: why has it taken until 2026 for us to finally achieve consecutive civic and cultural St Patrick’s Festival Parades? What barriers political, cultural or structural held us back? We know the many answers and acknowledging them is part of our ongoing healing and growth as a community.

This year, as we gather in Glasgow, to acknowledge St Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland, Nigeria and of migrants we are celebrating the most fundamental elements of our human identity—our language, our music, our dance, our stories, our traditions. The very things that gave our ancestors resilience, dignity and hope. And if we value these things in ourselves, we must defend them for others. The old accusations that we did not fit in, that we must assimilate rather than integrate, that migrants are an existential threat to society and identity are being recycled today. We have a moral and social obligation to challenge them, for our sake and for all who now call Scotland home.

That is what we celebrate on March 14, 2026. A message to Glasgow and to Scotland echoing back home to Ireland that the Irish experience is your experience, and your experience is ours.

And so, this year, we are calling on every organisation taking a section in the parade: Create a banner honouring a hero from our community past or present: Who founded your organisation? Who carried the burden, quietly, without fanfare, so that we could benefit from their work today?

They never had the chance to come together as a whole community in events like this parade. So, bring them with us now.

For example. St Roch’s and the GAA, you know you’ll need an Eoin Kelly banner and there are so many more.

In 2026 we bring our ancestors with us on our St Patrick’s Festival Parade. “Everything seems impossible until it’s done”

Danny Boyle, Lyn Crumlish and Noreen Downes are the organisers of the Glasgow St Patrick’s Festival Parade 2026 and also members of the St Roch's Marching Band