As Manchester City Council cuts services and grants to various events, it’s essential that the public is able to have an honest debate about what should be funded.

The organisers and City Council exaggerate crowd numbers for this parade enormously, probably by a factor of ten, while the media fail to scrutinise and report accurately.

These photographs below show the true level of attendance at the 2012 Manchester Irish Festival Parade as it passed through the city centre on 11 March.

On the event’s website, the organisers claimed: “100,000 people are expected to flock to the city centre and line the three mile route” and that this was “one of Europe’s biggest St. Patrick’s Day Parades.”

Since the parade, they’ve continued. Claiming that: “Organisers said an estimated 12,000 were packed into Albert Square alone — with more than 100,000 lining the full parade route.” See below for more analysis of these figures.

It isn’t surprising that the spin has continued after the event. I was first alerted to this last year by a fellow photographer who had gone along and afterwards expressed amazement at the low turn out, as compared to the misleading hype. So the small crowds this year aren’t anything new…
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Following my recent interview with Julia Grant, she suggested that perhaps I could organise a public discussion about the future of the August Bank Holiday event (which has been known as Manchester Pride since 2004) and the gay village.

This was arranged with the help of other members of the Facebook group Facts About Manchester Pride and was called: “Pull Your Fingers Out and Claim It Back” — a reference to something that Julia said in the interview.

The discussion took place on Thursday 25 August 2011 at the Hotel International on London Road, opposite Piccadilly Station.

The first half was about past and present. A chance for people to ask follow-up questions about the interview, or anything they’d ever wanted to ask Julia Grant. The second was about the future. What changes we would like to see and how to achieve those.

You can watch the whole thing here. It’s in four parts, with a total running time of 128 minutes.

An exclusive 10-minute video showing the disorder and looting of shops in the Piccadilly area on Tuesday evening and the police response.

Update: (25 October 2011): part of this article has been removed while further research is done.

“Stockport NHS cut gay charity by 100 per cent” was the emotive headline in The Pink Paper on 26 May 2011. (more…)