Saint Patrick's Day have been cross-community St Patrick's Day parades in towns throughout Northern Ireland, which have attracted thousands of spectators. In the mid-1990s the government of the Republic of Ireland began a campaign to use St Patrick's Day to showcase Ireland and its culture. The government set up a group called St Patrick's Festival, with the aims: The first St Patrick's Festival was held on 17 March 1996. In 1997, it became a three-day event, and by 2000 it was a four-day event. By 2006, the festival was five days long; more than 675,000 people attended the 2009 parade. Overall 2009's five-day
Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School its Ladue campus in 1931 and became independent of Washington University in 1949. By the 1950s, the tranquility of the Country Day campus was disrupted by the growth of the adjacent Lambert–Saint Louis International Airport. St. Louis Country Day School relocated to a new campus next to Mary Institute in Ladue in 1958, and eventually sold its old campus to the airport. Eliot's grandson, Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, who attended Mary Institute's kindergarten and Smith Academy, spoke at Mary Institute's centennial in 1959. Although various connections, including theatrical cooperation, had existed between Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day