Donal Shiels, head of St Patrick's Festival, talks about his day
THE OFFICE has four full-time staff, which swells to 30 as the St Patrick’s festival approaches. Then there are the 40 stage managers we contract in, 250 volunteers and, during the festival itself, 3,000 participants.
It’s a big production, but it gets a big audience. Around 670,000 people turned out to watch the parade alone last year, and another 350,000 watched it on TV.
It’s also a long way from what it used to be. I’m forever meeting people in their 40s who tell me of the St Patrick’s Day parade of their youth, that it was always raining, was in black and white and featured a lot of alarm companies.
At the moment each day is wall-to-wall meetings. I’ve just come out of a meeting with the Garda, emergency services, health-and-safety people and city-council departments. We had to finish a little early, to let the guards get organised for their protest.
Our office is on Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin, and I live in Artane. I usually get the bus so I can read, but today I drove.
I’ve a meeting in a minute with the TV people. We make three TV programmes out of the festival – the parade itself, the Skyfest fireworks display and a 30-minute highlight – so we were talking to the people at Coco TV about what they need. Thankfully, what both TV and live audiences want from a parade is the same: a pacy event that doesn’t sit down but keeps moving all the time. Because of that our team is going around the country to time each entry to the second.
This year the US channel NBC is coming to film live for its morning shows, which is a great coup. We had a recce crew of six over for the weekend, and now we are helping them organise follow-up interviews.
Every year we issue an open invitation to theatre and community groups to enter the parade, and we are always oversubscribed. This year the theme is “the sky’s the limit”.
The standard is amazingly high. The GAA is the main pageant, celebrating its 125th anniversary, and I’ve another meeting with them this afternoon. Tomorrow morning, at 8am, I’ve a board meeting, so I’ll be finishing up that presentation today, too.
Once the festival starts it’ll be even more hectic. As the father of two children I already know you can get by on four hours’ sleep – and, anyway, I enjoy it.
This year is particularly important to me, too, because it’s my last time as director. I’ve done it for five years now, and it’s time for me to move on and for the festival to benefit from fresh blood and fresh ideas.
** Donal Shiels is head of St Patrick’s Festival (www.stpatricksfestival.ie)
** In conversation with Sandra O’Connell