The prospect of Gerry Adams and Bairbre de Brun attempting the salsa would have been enough to entice a respectable crowd to the Falls Road in Belfast last weekend. Yet the annual west Belfast shindig, Feile An Phobail, has plenty more to offer and not just to the nationalist community, as organisers are at pains to point out.
Gerry and Bairbre were spotted at the festival marquee on Sunday night where more than 200 people had to be turned away from a sell-out gig by Juan de Marcos, founder of celebrated Cuban act, the Buena Vista Social Club, and his 17-piece band, the Afro Cuban All-Stars.
De Marcos introduced Mr Adams as "your president" - which went down a treat with the 1,200-strong crowd.
The director of the festival, Ms Caitriona Ruane, meanwhile, encouraged revellers to greet the motley crew of musicians with cries of a hundred thousand welcomes in Spanish.
Ms Ruane makes no apologies for the oft-criticised republican content of the festival but says theirs is politics "with a small `p'." And the politics is not just local. Revellers at Sunday night's gig heard performers speak out against the blockade of Cuba by the US. "The political content is what makes us different; it's what attracts people here from all over the world. We are an alternative festival."
Like most festival organisers, the woman from Co Mayo is concerned with putting backsides on seats as much as projecting the political and social concerns of this working-class area. Today might be the anniversary of internment but tonight's headline gig has an international feel. A Latino act, the Fermin Muguruza Sound System, will be supported by the Hannas, Northern Ireland's answer to the Corrs.
On Saturday, the latest superstar from the Louis Walsh stable, Samantha Mumba, is due to perform, following an appearance last year by boyband Westlife.
Ms Ruane says the festival is open to visitors from all backgrounds but concedes some events will not appeal to Protestants. "They are hardly going to be rushing down to our Mairead Farrell [the woman shot dead in Gibraltar by the SAS] Camogie Cup but they will and have been attending events such as our comedy night."
A sell-out gig on Monday night featured award-winning UK comedian Jeremy Hardy and Irish acts Eddie Bannon and Deirdre O'Kane.
A feile regular, artist Robert Ballagh, was back this year and could be found sipping mineral water in the recently-refurbished Irish language centre Culturlann - also home to the first Falls Road tourist information centre - before attending an art exhibition in St Mary's University College. It was launched on Monday by one of the exhibitors, Jim Fitzpatrick, a Dublin artist responsible for the creation of a Che Guevara icon, an image as pervasive in these parts as Bobby Sands.
The exhibition at St Mary's also includes an examination of St Patrick, "the man, the myth and the message" which controversially claims that red-white-and-blue, not green, are the official colours of the saint.
The festival mood was inescapable on the Falls Road this week. Streets bedecked with multicoloured bunting had green gazebos placed incongruously in the middle, in preparation for open-air parties which are being organised by 50 local community groups.
And each lunchtime hundreds of locals join curious tourists at the gates of the city cemetery for walking tours of the graveyard. "This cemetery shows the complexity of our identity," Sinn Fein councillor and tour guide Tom Hartley told his audience.
Among the 250,000 people buried there, many of them wealthy unionists, are the man who built the Titanic, an engineer who went down with it, and countless war dead.
For more information on Feile An Phobail call (048) 90 313440
