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New Coney Island venue for Great Irish Fair

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Harry Keaney

The Great Irish Fair will again take place this year on Coney Island — but at a different site.

The fair, an annual event to benefit the Diocese of Brooklyn’s Catholic Charities, will be staged on the weekend of Sept. 9-10 in Dreier-Offerman Park, a 60-acre space that runs parallel to the Belt Parkway, between Bay Parkway and Cropsey Avenue.

The new site, owned by the New York City Parks Department, is within sight of the fair’s old venue, Steeplechase Park.

Steeplechase is no longer available because it is being used for the development of a New York Mets minor league baseball park.

For almost a year, uncertainty surrounded where this year’s Great Irish Fair, the 20th, might take place. After last year’s fair, there followed a number of meetings between Mayor Giuliani and the chairman of the Great Irish Fair, Al O’Hagan, who said last week that the mayor had delivered on his promise to provide an alternative site.

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The fair has taken place in Steeplechase Park for the last 17 years. The first two fairs were held beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

For generations, Coney Island had been a magnet for the Irish. Indeed, according to O’Hagan, it’s only fair that the city has come to rescue of the Great Irish Fair since it was the Hibernians who created the former venue, Steeplechase Park, helping transform it from an ugly dumping ground into a special events park.

The chief brehon of this year’s Great Irish Fair will be Ed Wilkinson, editor of The Tablet, the Brooklyn diocesan newspaper.

The colleen queen will be Lenore McFall, a nursing student from Gerritsen Beach. A graduate of Stella Maris High School in Rockaway, she is currently studying at the Sisters of Charity Medical School on Staten Island.

The chief brehon and colleen queen will be officially installed during a press conference next month in Brooklyn’s borough hall.

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