KEY POINTS:
New York's lesbian City Council speaker says she wants to include gays and people from Northern Ireland in the St Patrick's Day parade, a proposal sure to meet opposition from the parade's Irish-Catholic organisers.
Christine Quinn also welcomed a proposal to invite two leading rivals in the Northern Ireland divide - Protestant cleric Ian Paisley and Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness - to lead next year's parade as a way to celebrate their recent political agreement.
The parade, billed as the largest St Patrick's Day parade in the world, has been controversial because of the refusal of its organisers, The Ancient Order of Hibernians, to include gays, lesbians and non-Catholics.
Representatives of the order could not be reached for comment.
Quinn, an Irish-American, is the city's top-ranking openly gay official and may run for mayor in 2009. Last year she refused to march, instead participating in Dublin's parade.
The New York parade, which will be held on March 17, is a private event, so Quinn has no authority as a city official to decide who can attend.
Paisley and McGuinness brokered a power-sharing agreement that brought together Northern Ireland's Protestants and Roman Catholics into the same provincial government in May, helping bring stability to the British province. A 1998 peace deal ended 30 years of sectarian conflict that killed 3600 people.
The idea to invite Paisley and McGuinness was floated by Niall O'Dowd, founder of the New York-based Irish Voice newspaper, and Quinn said it was "absolutely worth exploring".
Last year, the parade's longtime chairman, John Dunleavy, provoked an outcry when he compared the exclusion of gays and lesbians to blocking Nazi marchers from an Israeli parade or the Ku Klux Klan from an African-American parade.
- Reuters
