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
Saint Patrick's Day in the United States Day in 2016. This amount is down from the $4.8 billion spent in 2014. The world’s first recorded St Patrick’s Day celebration was in St. Augustine, Florida, in the year 1600 according to Dr. Michael Franicis's 2017 research in the Spanish Archives of the Indies. Franicis discovered the first St. Patrick Day Parade was also in St. Augustine in 1601. . Both were organized by the Spanish Colony's Irish vicar Ricardo Artur (Richard Arthur). The Charitable Irish Society of Boston organized the first observance of Saint Patrick's Day in the Thirteen Colonies in 1737. Surprisingly, the celebration was not Catholic