Shona McCarthy should be winding down as she finishes almost a decade leading the world’s largest arts festival, but there seems no let-up yet. It’s her final day as chief executive of the society that runs Edinburgh Festival Fringe on Saturday, when she’ll give a TEDx talk at the University of St Andrews. She was in Washington, DC, for a St Patrick’s Day event, but that was for her first engagement as chairwoman of the International Fund for Ireland.
Thankfully that new role is not full-time, as after a record-setting nine years at the fringe she’s ready to ease off a little. “I’m tired. You feel it to your bones. This job is a hard one at any time, but particularly the last four or five years,” she says about the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath.
“It’s very public. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is this odd little organisation,” a charity that convenes the festival and provides core operations, such as box office and marketing. “It’s like this little mad piñata that everybody looks to for the answers, and the fringe has such a wide and massive stakeholder group that you feel constantly tossed in the storms of it all.”
After 35 years of nonstop work, she says, “I’m just going to take three months and walk the beach and watch the hawthorn come on the hedges on the Antrim coast.”
While she was leading the fringe, Ballycastle, “a wee village 16 miles from the Giant’s Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge”, was her home with her partner, Bobby Gordon, and her two daughters. But aside from spending lockdown in Co Antrim “rather than in a flat in Leith”, plus a couple of visits home each year, McCarthy has been in Edinburgh since 2016. “Mostly Bobby came this way because this job needs you to be present.”
Her daughters are now in their 20s, “adventurers” like herself. Toraigh, whose name comes from the island – “my mum said, ‘Why don’t you go the full hog and call her Blasket?’” – is a DJ in London. Dara – “as in Doire, Derry, from the oak, so they both have north-coast-affiliated names” – is a musician in Edinburgh.
After McCarthy announced that she was leaving the fringe, “people were asking what next, or pitching other big international festivals to me that would take me to London or Australia or wherever. I wasn’t remotely interested. I want to go home. I want to be on our island again. I want to be in the same place as Bobby.”
She leaves Edinburgh Festival Fringe in good shape. Last year’s featured more than 3,700 shows – with almost 100 from the island of Ireland – sold 2.6 million tickets and attracted 1,800 promoters, producers and bookers from 64 countries hoping to spot talent.
As she prepares to leave Scotland, she has been outspoken about the lack of state support for the fringe. It might surprise people that such a big, long-established festival, with a global presence, where so much new creative work is first seen, has not received government funding before now.
The fringe isn’t curated: if you can sort a venue and bring your show, you’re in. “It’s a platform, like a YouTube for live performance. Everybody who takes part does so at their own risk.” Money to run the festival comes from registration fees, ticket commissions and sponsorship, so Covid “made us automatically insolvent”.
Fringe repaid artists’ registration fees for 2020 – “we knew there’d be no future for the festival if the artists were out of pocket” – and with no festival that year there was no ticket-fee income. “All our reserves were gone and we were in deficit overnight.” The fringe asked for help from the Scottish government, which offered a loan.
“It was challenging to make the case for public support,” McCarthy says, but the fringe now has direct government funding – £300,000 (€360,000) in 2025-2026. “Festival income no longer covers the cost of our services. We needed the Scottish government to recognise this as an extraordinary thing that happens here every year. It’s not just a festival; it’s a performing arts marketplace.”
Running the festival’s enormous infrastructure costs €6 million or €7 million a year and requires almost 40 year-round staff.
McCarthy uses a telling analogy. “It’s the equivalent of an Olympics or Commonwealth Games in culture and arts, but with nothing supporting the infrastructure.” While some fringe artists are publicly funded, “in sports they’d never say, ‘We fund the athletes, so there’s no need to finance the Olympic Village, ticketing, security.’ We’re expected to do all that central bit.”
She acknowledges that Scotland’s culture secretary, Angus Robertson, “worked really hard to get a proper settlement for the arts” and that core funding for the fringe society is “a real breakthrough”. But the fringe had been “falling between the cracks”, McCarthy says. It’s a bugbear.
“Governments can rustle up tens of millions really easily when it comes to sport. The UCI cycling championships here a couple of years back commanded £60 million investment. We’re talking about such minuscule amounts, yet the deep reward for societies that invest in their artists, you see the results everywhere. I wonder if it’s a gender thing: sometimes decisions are made by lads who love hanging out in the corporate-hospitality hut at the side of the golf open. Or is it a political thing? You get a quick win with the big sporting event.”
While fringe doesn’t have one big televised moment, she says, you can’t turn on BBC Radio 2 or Radio 4, or Taskmaster on Channel 4, “without hearing somebody saying, ‘If it hadn’t been for the Edinburgh fringe ...’
“The fringe will always find a way – pop-up venues, street performance, free shows in pubs, very low production costs and collecting money in a bucket” – but what was at risk was “keeping the services at the standard for a global event”.
For Irish acts heading to the fringe – this year featured 93 from the island of Ireland, compared with 2,000 from Britain – it’s a huge financial outlay, and a risk, requiring several thousand euro to bring even a basic show, hire a venue and pay for accommodation. They do so in the hope of making a splash at a festival where thousands of others are looking for that same break.
McCarthy says it has been joyful to see. “Ireland has always punched above its weight in theatre and new writing. You know you’re going to get something fantastic from Fishamble, from Prime Cut. Companies come back year after year, and the quality of their work is always really good.”
In comedy, she mentions Irish regulars such as Jason Byrne (“still our guilty pleasure”), Tommy Tiernan (“his last fringe show, I laughed so hard I literally fell off my seat”), Joanne McNally, Dara Ó Briain, Alison Spittal, Shane Daniel Byrne, Micky Bartlett and the Derry Mammy aka Serena Terry.
She has observed the trajectory of artists after Edinburgh: David Ireland’s early works were “the talk of the fringe”, for example; then last year his play The Fifth Step ran as part of Edinburgh International Festival, the official, curated event of which McCarthy’s festival forms the fringe; it will open in the West End of London, starring Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman, in May.
There have been other “really beautiful success stories”, too, such as Brian Foster’s play Myra’s Story, which went on to tour extensively – it is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in May – and Joyce Greenaway’s play Whisk(e)y Wars, which started in an Edinburgh bar’s back room and is now “popping up all over the place”.
“The work from Ireland, North and South, is always really strong. Culture Ireland is brilliant supporting shows coming to the fringe. It would be great to see the North on a firmer footing, with more substantive support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Because of the lack of arts funding, the North is still the poor cousin on these islands.”
McCarthy recalls the irony of the Stormont Department of Culture being disbanded after Derry’s year as City of Culture, in 2013, which she led, and the arts council moving to Lisburn – “such weird decisions after such a cultural success” – and notes a strong lobby for renewed investment in the arts in the North, with big names such as Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol weighing in.
McCarthy also has “a real strong sense of the work I did years ago with Imagine Belfast”, bidding for European Capital of Culture in 1998-99, “setting a vision for what Belfast could be like post-Good Friday Agreement. We weren’t ready and we didn’t win. It was such an exciting and satisfying process, to engage a whole city in conversation about what it could be like, and its cultural DNA outside of its political and conflict story. Then the same in Derry.
The North has a long way to get to that understanding of the importance of the arts and of cultural identity to a nation
“For five years I managed Paul Hamlyn Foundation funding in Northern Ireland – a lot of high-risk, artistically driven projects about peacebuilding and trying to move a society forward. I still feel a sense of unfinished business back home, but I don’t know what it is.”
Leaving the fringe, “I’m super proud. I feel I’m leaving it in a really strong position. Such a fantastic bunch of people to work with. A great organisational culture. Some breakthroughs in getting Scottish government support and capital-project funding, a new year-round fringe building coming from the UK government. We’ve tripled the number of arts-industry people who come to Edinburgh to find work.”
At the International Fund for Ireland, she’ll see “where I can add value, bring whatever expertise I have to the table. There’s an ongoing need for peacebuilding. Just look at Belfast and what a journey that city has had. But there’s still 20 miles of Peace Wall, still a journey to go. I’d say the same about less visible borders across the island. Still, work to be done.” By this she means Brexit’s effects on the island, and also “the barriers in people’s heads”.
She is heartened by innovative cultural supports such as Ireland’s basic income for the arts pilot. “The North has a long way to get to that understanding of the importance of the arts and of cultural identity to a nation. Ireland always seems to play very successfully to its history of artists and playwrights and literary giants. Anywhere I’ve travelled in the world, I’m aware of my own Irishness, and also others’ awareness of Irish identity. And it’s usually very rooted in the arts.”
