By FRANK LOMBARDI and MICHAEL SAUL
With additional reporting by Elva Ramirez and Jenny Clevstrom
In a shimmering swirl of shamrocks and bagpipes, the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade proudly forged its way up Fifth Ave. yesterday to the delight of spectators and marchers alike.
While politics played its usual role, it was the Irish spirit that dominated the day.
"Who's Irish over here? Let me hear you!" yelled New Rochelle deli manager Dennis Dunn to others in the Long Green Line on Fifth Ave. "This is the biggest and best parade, to show your New York Irish pride." Dunn got out of the sack at 4:15 a.m. to get to the event on time in green sweater covered with buttons and his face painted.
Nearby, former city cop Tommy Fitzgerald, 69, waved toward Dunn and said, "To be Irish is to be happy, jovial and in good spirits."
"I've been marching for 40 years," he grinned. "'Tis a great stretch of the legs."
The parade's biggest fans likely were members of the Monahan clan camped at 59th St. and Fifth Ave.
"I've been coming to this exact spot since I was 7," said Geralyn Monahan-Jones, 50, a preschool director from Beacon, N.Y. "But my family has been at this corner for 99 years. It's a tradition for us."
But the parade was dogged once again by controversy over not giving gays a green light to march under their own banner.
Elected officials and gay-rights advocates unleashed a torrent of criticism on parade chairman John Dunleavy, who recently defended the parade's refusal by saying it would be akin to letting neo-Nazis join an Israeli parade or the Ku Klux Klan into an African-American event.
"That doesn't have any place in our dialogue today, and what we ought to be doing is celebrating the Irish-American community," Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) said before joining the march.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, "We should have tolerance for everyone" and not focus on the "comments that one person makes."
Scores of gay activists near 57th St. screamed "Shame! Shame! Shame!" as the parade passed by.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who is openly lesbian and of Irish descent, attended a variety of St. Patrick's Day events yesterday but skipped the parade. "I can't march in a place where I'm not welcome," said Quinn (D-Manhattan).
As the gay-rights controversy simmered, traditional politics found its usual place in the parade. Giuliani and his wife, Judith, marched alongside Mayor Bloomberg, as spectators urged him to run for President in 2008.
"Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!" the crowd chanted to the ex-mayor's delight.
Bloomberg, who said he's planning a trip to Ireland, said the most emotional part of the parade was watching Eugene Stolowski, one of the six Bravest forced to jump from a hellish Bronx inferno in January 2005, make his way up Fifth Ave.
"This is a guy who was not going to live, that was going to be a quadriplegic, and, now, he's marching," Bloomberg said. "They're pushing along the wheelchair. He refuses to get in it."
Asked how he felt to be marching, with his empty wheelchair nearby, Stolowski enthusiastically replied, "Very good! It's a wonderful day."
