City Councilor Ed Flynn is calling for “major changes” including possibly moving the St. Patrick’s Day parade out of South Boston after this past weekend’s wave of drunkenness, destruction and violence, but not everyone is on board.
Pointing to the massive crowds seen this year, Flynn said the city needs to take a “zero-tolerance” approach to debauchery at the popular parade, where drunken fights with police and other criminal activity resulted in 10 arrests that included gun, assault and battery, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct charges.
“We must make major changes and implement a zero-tolerance for public drinking, any form of violence, fighting and destruction of property and other quality of life issues,” Flynn said in a statement. “If we are not able to meet basic standards of decency and respect the South Boston neighborhood, the parade should move out of South Boston indefinitely.”
Flynn, a former chief marshal of the parade who represents South Boston on the City Council, said Southie residents, many seniors and young families were “disgusted with the public intoxication and fights throughout the parade route.”
“With almost a million visitors to South Boston for the parade, we can’t sustain an ‘anything goes’ attitude any longer,” he added. “This neighborhood deserves to be treated with respect.”
While Flynn broached the possibility of a move, where the parade is held is ultimately up to its longtime organizer, the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, which sends in an annual application to the city for the event, Mayor Michelle Wu told reporters Wednesday.
“It really is up to the organizers of the parade as to what route they want to propose and where they want to do it and if the consensus is that the organizers in the neighborhood don’t want to do it anymore or want to do it somewhere else, then the city’s always happy to respond to those applications as they come in,” Wu said.
The mayor said the city strives to make sure everyone who participates in the annual parade, which honors the city’s Irish community, is safe, and praised police officers for the job they did to keep the situation from getting worse.
“They were out in full force making sure that the route was secured and that incidents that came up were responded to very quickly so I want to thank them especially for doing a great job,” Wu said.
While the potential of moving the parade out of Southie prompted headlines this week, a South Boston community leader said the talks that will take place between Flynn, police, parade organizers and residents will be more centered around making major changes with public safety of the neighborhood as a top priority.
Talks would be focused on having a police presence in parks and on the MBTA, with alcohol prohibited in public and confiscated if observed, the community leader said.
A move out of South Boston would occur “only if we’re not able to make significant changes to the parade,” the source said, noting that it’s too early to speculate whether parade organizers would be receptive to such a major change.
“I think everyone wants to work together and work out the challenges that we have so that the parade can stay in South Boston,” the community leader said.
While Flynn is open to the idea, another South Boston lawmaker, state Sen. Nick Collins, is adamantly opposed to a move, saying that he does not support moving the parade downtown, an area that has been speculated as a possible destination.
The parade is an SJC-protected right of the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, Collins said, although he denounced the “violence and chaos” that took place at this year’s event as “disturbing and unacceptable.”
Collins is calling for an enhanced city-state level security plan going forward for the St. Patrick’s Day event, which he said draws a spectator crowd twice the size of the Boston Marathon.
“We need to prioritize the experience of law-abiding citizens coming to celebrate what is annually the largest public event in Boston and not allow disorderly and criminal behavior of visiting spectators to disgrace a tradition that’s been around for 124 years,” Collins said. “Those who break the law must be held accountable.”
Ten people arrested at the celebrations Sunday were arraigned in South Boston Municipal Court the next day. Boston Police are also still reviewing “a lot of videos” of various assaults that took place at Medal of Honor Park, the source said.
