Dublin: Much of the world is turning green Wednesday for St. Patrick's Day, the annual celebration of all hues of Irishness.
Half a million people were forecast to line the 3-kilometre route of the flagship Dublin parade, which is exploring the theme "The Extraordinary World."
It is a nod to Ireland's increasing multiculturalism - as well as the past two centuries' global spread of the Irish.
This year Ireland also is pushing itself especially hard as a tourist destination as the country faces its worst recession since the Great Depression, with double-digit unemployment and net emigration for the first time in 15 years.
St. Patrick's Day is Ireland's first major tourist event of the year, packing hotels and pubs with visitors seeking an all-night party.
Ireland's weeklong festival gets bigger each year, with more than 100 parades Wednesday in cities, towns and villages across the island of 6 million.
The Tourism Ireland agency wangled a deal for major world landmarks - including the Sydney Opera House, London Eye, Toronto's CN Tower and New York's Empire State Building - to be bathed in green floodlights as part of a marketing push on four continents.
Virtually the entire Irish government left the country this week to press the flesh of foreign leaders and corporate kingpins in 23 countries in hopes of rekindling the investment wave that fueled Ireland's lost Celtic Tiger boom of 1994-2007.
