By Mike Farragher

The St. Patrick’s Day parade in Belmar is one of the largest parades in the state, and this year was no exception. An occasional cloud lazily floated on the cool ocean breezes as a crowd estimated to be in the hundred thousand range lined the parade route to cheer on marching bands, emergency vehicles with screeching sirens, and bagpipers.

There was one group of little people (I was unable to get the politically correct consensus as to whether to use “midget” or “dwarf” to describe their stature, so we all arrived on “little people” over a pint) who were not able to participate in the festivities. They milled around an ornately decorated bus, holding up signs that read: “Belmar oppresses little people.”

Could this be? A St. Patrick’s Day committee was banning leprechauns from their parade?

“We’re here to march,” said one little person who went by the name Leo. “I drove a long way to come here and pass out candy to the kids in the parade route and bring a little fun into the mix. We just got kicked out of the staging area.”

“We’ve been coming here for nine years,” says a bewildered Glen Kislowski, the organizer (and big person) of the protest. “We had 62 people partying on the main street here last year. No one will give us a straight story on why we are banned this year. We just get a curt email from the organizers telling us, ‘You’re banned.’”

But this year’s parade grand marshal and festival co-organizer, Eugene “Chip” Cavanagh, tells a different story.

“We got a lot of complaints about that crowd last year,” he said of Kislowski’s posse. “They had open containers of alcohol in the middle of the street, and that is against the law, plain and simple. They’re lucky they didn’t get locked up.”

“There’s a guy walking down the street (as part of the parade) dressed in a pint of Guinness, observed protester Colleen Bilodeau of Jackson, New Jersey. “That doesn’t promote drinking too much!”

In addition to the public drinking, Cavanagh cited the platforms at the top of the bus where the little people greeted the crowd as being unsafe.

A closer inspection of the protestor’s signs and handouts revealed that they were associated with gleny.com, a website of partygoers who blog about the best bars and sell the kinds of marital aids found at the glass concessions counter of a Times Square peep show.

“The site is frisky, but that is real life,” says Kislowski. “Belmar became a town on bars and clubs and renters. They said they got complaints last year, but they didn’t say what it was. It is an overall shun, to me in particular and the youth in general.”

Kislowski is so distraught over what he sees as the town council’s effort to discourage Belmar’s partying ways by raising taxes and cracking down on beachgoers that he is contemplating a run for office.