What is the Phoenix St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Irish Faire?
The Phoenix St. Patrick’s Day Parade is the Valley’s Irish parade, a mile-long march of pipe bands, step dancers, school bands, floats and Irish clubs down Third Street from Oak Street to Margaret T. Hance Park, held at 10 a.m. on the Saturday on or before March 17 since the 1980s. It ends at the Irish Faire, a ticketed all-day festival in the park around the Irish Cultural Center, with three stages, corned beef and cabbage, Irish beer and whiskey and a kids’ zone. The 44th parade is Saturday, March 13, 2027; the parade is free and faire admission is $20.
What makes it more than a parade is the park. Hance Park is the deck over Interstate 10 between Central and Third, and the Irish Cultural Center at 1106 North Central, with its replica stone cottage and the McClelland Library, a research library built in 2012 to look like a 12th-century Norman keep with 22 tons of Irish limestone in its arches, sits at its west end. Since 2024 the center has been inside the faire fence, so the ticket buys the library and the genealogy desk along with the pipers.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is the civic, daytime half of the holiday, 25 minutes from Old Town, and the other half is in the site’s guide to Old Town Scottsdale nightlife. Pair it with Fountain Hills’ green fountain on the 17th itself and you have covered the Valley’s two St. Patrick’s traditions in one March weekend.
How to do it
Tickets. The parade costs nothing. Faire tickets for 2027 are $20, $15 for seniors and military, free for children 12 and under and for dogs, sold online through the committee’s site and at the gate; the online line is shorter. Wristbands allow re-entry until 5 p.m. In 2026 the committee added a $60 Emerald Green ticket for a 21-and-over tent with whiskey and cigar tastings and mixology classes; watch for it again.
Getting there and parking. From Scottsdale, Indian School Road west to Third Street is the simplest drive, or Loop 202 to the 51 to McDowell. The committee’s free lot is at Central Avenue and Palm Lane, on the west side of Central, four minutes on foot from the route with a faire shuttle every 15 minutes. The better plan is the Valley Metro light rail: park at the Central and Camelback lot or at a Tempe park-and-ride and get off at McDowell/Central or Roosevelt/Central, each a few blocks from the park. The Burton Barr Central Library sits at the park’s northwest corner, a landmark for meeting up.
Watching the parade. Step-off is 10 a.m. at Oak Street. The route is residential for the first half-mile, which is where the sidewalk is emptiest, and crowded from McDowell south. The parade turns west on Moreland Street near the park; the best vantage is the east side of Third between Portland and Moreland, with shade until about 11.
The faire. Three stages run continuously until 5: the George O’Brien Memorial Stage under the Central Avenue bridge, the St. Patrick’s Day Stage on the lawn, sponsored by Ireland’s consulate in Los Angeles, and the Leavy Family Stage on the east side. The 2027 bill runs from Celtic Steps and the Bracken School of Irish Dance to The Big Fellahs, Kilted Spirit, Swainn, Stoneybank and The Desert Rovers, with Lenny Kelleher and Michael Patrick Gallagher among the singers. Food is corned beef and cabbage and Arizona food vendors; the pubs pour Irish beer and Buskers Irish whiskey. The kids’ zone has bounce houses.
What to skip. The gate at 11, when the parade empties into it. Go in early or at 1. And do not drive to the park itself; the streets around Hance close for the parade.
Flynn’s Irish Imports and the first six marchers
The parade’s own history, written by Mike Hogan, whose father John was one of the “starting six” who led the first march, puts the founding meetings at Flynn’s Irish Imports in October 1982, where proprietor Lorraine Flynn and her husband Mike hosted the planning. The names on the committee were the Phoenix Irish of the day: John Corcoran, who put in money and whatever else was needed; Frank Leavy, who donated $10,000 for the insurance the city’s permit required; councilman Howard Adams, who, as the history puts it, “secured the Cultural Center” for the parade; Father Joe Gillespie; and Jimmy O’Conner, who marched every year after. The first parade staged in the Park Central parking lot on Central Avenue, and its first entry was a float sponsored by Phoenix New Times with characters from Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, a sponsorship that lasted one year. The unofficial headquarters later moved down Central to Durant’s, which still has the right bar for a post-parade Jameson.
The committee’s count is the one to trust on the first year: the 2020 parade was billed as the 37th, 2023 as the 40th and 2027 as the 44th, which puts the first march in 1984; the organizer’s materials elsewhere date the organization to 1983, so the record wobbles by a year. Related institutions grew with it. The Arizona Colleen pageant began in 1983. The Irish Cultural Center itself came out of a 1990s city bond drive, with matching funds raised by Bill O’Brien’s Irish business network, on city land at the west end of Hance Park. The cottage was finished in 2004 and the McClelland Library, named for Shamrock Foods chairman Norman P. McClelland, a native of Northern Ireland, opened in October 2012. The committee, a 501(c)(3) whose board and workers are all volunteers, is led in 2027 by president Jeff Aspland, with Mary Wnek running the parade and Harry Sexton the faire, and it lists the Cultural Center’s address as its own.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale has bars that go green on March 17, but it has no parade and no Irish institution; the Valley’s are in central Phoenix, in a park that is also home to the Japanese Friendship Garden and a few blocks from Roosevelt Row. The Phoenix parade is a small-city parade, which is to say the floats are homemade, the dancers come from the Valley’s step-dance schools, and the pipers are the same bands you will hear in Fountain Hills a few days later. That is its appeal. Spend the morning there, the afternoon at the faire and the evening back in Old Town, and the holiday is done properly.