Musicians, designers, dancers and writers across Ireland are busy curating arts festivals to energise small towns and villages over the winter season.
Design Kenmare Festival (DKF), Dingle Literary Festival, and Dingle’s Other Voices are some of the festivals kicking off in the southwest this month, as the tourism season closes, while later in December pubs and halls in Gweedore, Co Donegal will come alive with traditional Irish music during Scoil Gheimhridh (winter School).
Eamonn O’Sullivan, a graphic designer who relocated back home to Kenmare from Dublin with his young family seven years ago, has found a vibrant design community there which has curated the inaugural DKF this weekend (November 14th-16th).
“What Dingle’s Other Voices has done for music, we’d like to do for design,” O’Sullivan says. “Kenmare has hospitality and tourism, but we don’t really have factories, so [craft and design] is an area that’s growing all the time and contributing to the economy, and the community works together as well.”
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“We wanted to highlight that, and also to show students and young people that if you’re from rural areas there are opportunities there in these fields.”
Kenmare will transform into a hub of ideas as TV architect Amanda Bone, interior designers Bryan O’Sullivan and Roisin Lafferty and artist Maser join panel discussions on topics such as sustainable design, timeless design, and the evolving marketplace.
Further west, in Dingle, Hannah Bulger and her committee of volunteers have curated this year’s bilingual Dingle Literary Festival (November 21st-23rd) which will see actor Gabriel Byrne speak about his favourite books, as well as hosting talks by Palestinian writer Karim Kattan, Sarah Moss, Hugo Hamilton, Karl Geary and Elaine Feeney.
“We like to think of it as a cosy, intimate conversation festival,” Bulger, the festival’s director, says. “The conversations you see on the stage, you feel they can run over into the pub and into the cafe, especially after seeing the interaction between the authors on stage.”
Dingle Literary Festival and the town’s other arts festivals help to bridge the economic gap between the end of the tourism season and Christmas, Bulger says.
“Last year more than 2,000 people came here for it. I would hope it’s a boon for the town because it’s located all throughout the town, like Other Voices.
“Every January, we start the planning, and each member of the committee comes with their own ideas or authors that they’d love to see, and we work from there. It’s a very ego-less project on the part of the committee. You definitely master the art of the follow-up email.”
Deeper into the winter season, Gweedore in northwest Donegal comes alive with cosy traditional Irish music sessions and workshops during Scoil Gheimhridh (December 27th-January 1st), which is now entering its 31st year.
Cathal Ó Curráin, one of the organisers, says: “Every year, we have 220 students learning in workshops. There are beginner classes in tin whistle and fiddle, and then we have sessions all around the pubs.”
Ó Curráin explains: “The young kids from the area get to learn from the best musicians in the industry. We pride ourselves on being immersive.”
Community involvement is also encouraged at Leitrim Dance Festival (April 9th-12th), which aims to reignite old-style, or sean nós, dancing and create space for it atat traditional music sessions.
A member of the festival’s organising committee, Edqina Guckian, says: “There’s a big movement happening in dance: to dance for joy and to have a community dance. Irish step dancing can be very competitive, and for more traditional dancing there are two competitions – the fleadh and the oireachtas – where maybe people feel the pressure of the competition and they dance for the judges and not for themselve."
Guckian is hoping to transform local farmers’ marts, which she says are “natural amphitheatres”, into music venues, with dancer-musician pairings performing live next April, she says.
“The hope is that the musicians and dancers would sit in the ring while the audience surrounds them. Leitrim is rural, there isn’t really a corner of Leitrim that’s modern, and we can’t always be in theatres.”
In Schull in west Cork, Fastnet Film Festival (May 20th-24th) now attracts up to 8,000 people to the small village every year, having started in the form of a free screening night as part of the village’s former arts festival.
Hilary McCarthy, who works on the festival’s communications and programming, says it now has full-time employees, yearly prize money of €23,500, and gets submissions from up to 700 film-makers from about 50 countries every year. Yet the atmosphere remains relaxed during the festival, which occurs during tourism’s shoulder season.
“We don’t have any red carpet. The atmosphere is very informal and it attracts people from all over the world.”
[ From the archive: All the town’s a screen at the Fastnet Short Film FestivalOpens in new window ]
“I would say as a direct or indirect result of the film festival, we’ve had people who’ve bought houses locally, and the West Cork Film Studios in Skibbereen is run off its feet. The festival has opened up an industry. Volunteers who came down to help at the festival are now employed locally,” she adds.
Back in Kenmare, craftsmanship and design will take centre stage this weekend. Interior designer Bryan O’Sullivan, who has designed interiors for clients including New York’s The Frick Museum and London’s Claridges restaurant, says handmade pieces by Irish craftworkers and designers often elevate his projects and create talking points for his clients.
“There is amazing talent in Ireland,” he says. “We’ve had stuff shipped from Ireland all the time. It’s a talking point for the client ... the quality of the work as well – the quality is far superior.”
