Three-legged race participants drink green beer at one of the six Irish pubs in Copenhagen. Photograph: John McConnicco/AP
Slainte. Today is St Patrick's Day and officials in Dublin are bracing themselves for 700,000 people to throng through the city for the annual parade.
There is also something of a landmark event this year in Belfast where the city council is paying for the St Patrick's Day parade for the first time.
Parades will be held in many other cities around the world, including New York, Chicago (where they have dyed the river green every year since the 1960s), Sydney and Singapore. There was a 4,000-strong parade in London last weekend.
Many people love St Patrick's Day, be they plastic Paddies or the real thing. Celebrators enjoy supping a few pints of the black stuff, and some will no doubt be reaching for various hangover cures tomorrow morning.
But questions are being asked in Dublin about the health of the celebration. An Irish Times article this week (unfortunately behind their subscription wall) asked "Has St Patrick's Day lost its way?".
The paper said the day was now "the most depressing and dangerous" one of the year in Ireland.
Last year more than 700 people were arrested across Ireland for public order offences on St Patrick's Day, more than double the arrests on the day in 2004, and anxieties have not been helped by recent riots in Dublin's O'Connell street.
The level of drunken behaviour and public order problems on St Patrick's in recent years has prompted supermarkets and off-licences to delay the start of their alcohol sales on the day.
In the Times today, David Sharrock writes that: "Every year Ireland celebrates its patron saint with a very public round of hand-wringing about how awful the occasion is."
He reports that some Irish politicians are exasperated because the Irish parliament has gone into recess for almost a week due the absence of so many of its members.
Apparently only the defence and tourism ministers are around and 29 government members have travelled to 22 different countries. New York and Cheltenham are probably the most popular destinations for Ireland's great and good, Sharrock says.
The prime minister, Bertie Ahern, is in Washington with the US president, George Bush, to present the bowl of shamrock at the White House. His officials stress though that it is not just a jolly; he will also lobby for a bill to legalise the estimated 50,000 undocumented Irish in the US.
St Patrick's Day was once a much more traditional religious festival which commemorated the Welshman who converted Ireland to Christianity and became its patron saint. But in recent years it has become a five-day entertainment extravaganza which is worth around £40m to the economy.
So what do you think, has St Patrick's Day lost its way? We would also like to hear from anyone with any good St Patrick's Day anecdotes, especially ones with a bit more to them than "went out and got drunk".
