Emily Fritz | Staff Writer

Sept. 15, 2022

Irish Partnership Pittsburgh celebrated its 31st-annual Pittsburgh Irish Festival this past weekend. The festival saw around 25,000 attendees this year at a new venue and National Historic Landmark — Carrie Blast Furnaces.

Mairin Petrone, the executive director for the festival and Duquesne University alumnus said, “This new venue was so ‘Pittsburgh’ and so beautiful” and that the Carrie Blast Furnaces were the “perfect backdrop for the vibrancy of our event.”

Petrone has lent her talents to the festival since its first year in 1991. In just over three decades, the festival has changed and adapted, but Petrone said that “we all come together to celebrate culture, as “everyone involved and attending the Pittsburgh Irish Festival is family.”

The festival was a three-day weekend event that was filled to the brim with Irish food, entertainment and vendors.

Among the anticipated line-up of Irish musicians and entertainers was Shannon Lambert-Ryan, one of the vocalists for the Irish folk band RUNA. Lambert-Ryan said “Irish festivals are usually pretty open and welcoming to a pretty broad scope of people.”

For groups like RUNA, the importance of Irish festivals originates with the communities that host them and the Irish heritage that they…