Mark Graham - A Year of Festivals in Ireland

A YEAR OF FESTIVALS IN

IRELAND

A YEAR OF FESTIVALS IN IRELAND
First published 2014

by New Island

2 Brookside

Dundrum Road

Dublin 14

www.newisland.ie

Copyright Mark Graham, 2014

Mark Graham has asserted his moral rights.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-267-6

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-268-3

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-269-0

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Forbidden Fruit, in the grounds of The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, 2012, Mark Graham.

Introduction

O n a sharp November evening, after three nights spent sleeping in a van at the side of a road in Tullamore, the door of Wanderly Wagon, my camper van home from home, slid back and I emerged in a neat tux and black tie. Suited and booted, I imagined myself cutting a figure somewhere between Daniel Craigs Bond and Johnny Depps Roux from Chocolat . In reality, I was styling it somewhere between Ricky Gervais and Pecker Dunne. To be fair, Id found the boots in a skip in Ballinasloe, so I was working skip-diving chic as best I could. It was night three of Macra na Feirme s Queen of the Land Festival, and Id been invited along to act as escort for one of the unlucky Lovely Girls. I stank of baby-wipes with an underlying hint of diesel fumes, but I was ready to party.

This shindig was three months into my quest to attend three festivals in Ireland every week for a year. Let me run that by you again three festivals EVERY week, for a whole year. Impossible! I hear you cry. Impossible? Maybe. Difficult? Definitely. Spending three nights sessioning with a rabble of wild, young, rural types from all over Ireland at a Lovely Girls competition in Co. Offaly is more fun than a bag of mushrooms on a ghost train, but it can knock a couple of years off your life expectancy.

In May 2011, having scraped together a 10 per cent deposit for a house, I applied for a mortgage. One financial institution told me to call back to them in three months with a tidier ledger; another said that they would give me a mortgage if I anted up 20 per cent of the cost of the bubbled-up price tag. I prepared myself for some serious scrimping and saving, repetitive weekends shackled to the couch, getting sucked in by some reality television programme or other. Thankfully, a little voice in the back of my head yelled Stall the Digger! This crowd has a worse credit rating than you, and youre going to kowtow to them? Cop yerself on! So I did. Using the savings Id squirreled away, I bought a fifth-hand VW camper van and decided to seek out the festive pueblos, parishes and pirceanna of Ireland to load up on some positivity. I was tired of being told how we lost the run of ourselves in a bubble bath of bad banking decisions. I certainly hadnt lost the run of myself, and I had a Ronnie Whelan that I wasnt on my own. My suspicion was that not only were there a number of people out there who were innocent of bankrupting our country, they were more than likely the same people who were still volunteering to create fun and festivals in the places where they lived, making the country a better place to live in and giving the rest of us something to look forward to. I was so sure of this that I was willing to bet a year of my life and my dwindling deposit on it. I wanted to meet these people, and to be free from negativity. The plan was to become something of a positivity vampire.

Taking to the road meant making some sacrifices. Quiet weekends at home by the fire, spare time, hobbies and any flimsy chance that existed for a stable relationship were all non-runners. To participate fully in the spirit of a few of these festivals, Id need to put my physical health, sanity and general well-being on the line. Supersize Me is only in the hapenny place compared to throwing yourself consistently into the middle of some of the sessions out on the festival trail of Ireland. The flip side was that lots of responsibilities were shed to go and live in a van and be part of the best parties Ireland had to offer for a whole year. I dont know why I didnt think of it sooner.

Even during the preliminary stages of partially planning my adventures, I had a feeling that my quest was going to lead to festival experiences of epic proportions. I decided to give the folk at the Guinness Book of Records a shout to check what it might take for me to qualify for their yearly catalogue of obsessives. They werent keen on my idea, and reckoned that if you had two lads on a street corner in Wexford banging pots together, a few other heads would turn up with bags of cans and wed call it a pot-banging festival, i.e., we have loose criteria for what constitutes a festival in Ireland. When you encounter something like the Cow Dung Festival in Castleconnor, Co. Sligo, youd have to concede that they might have a point.

In order to put some structure on my trundling around the country, I decided to come up with my own festival definition. Its a loose-fitting description at best. I like to think of it as a telescopic yardstick, capable of being altered slightly to fit different situations, but it certainly helped to steer a course through the festival-infested fields of Ireland. I took a festival to be:

An event, usually and ordinarily staged by a local community or interest group, which centres on and celebrates some unique aspect of that community, interest group and/or festival itself. It can be a day or period of celebration, a religious commemoration, an annual celebration or anniversary or an organised series of events, concerts, plays, films or activities, typically held annually in the same place .

The adventure hadnt even started and already the spontaneity and joy was being sucked out of it by trying to define it. Jaysus, get the Guinness crowd on the phone again, I think I just broke the wet blanket land speed record.

My festival definition was spurious at best, but at least it was a little clearer than that offered by Indian mystic and guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who said: The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival. I have absolutely no idea what he meant by that, but I do know that trying to capture or define something as ephemeral as the landscape of Irish festivals is problematic, impractical and idiotic.

And so we begin.

To all the people who give their time, energy and imagination to create and curate the festivals that make Ireland a better place Big Love!

Acknowledgements

A fter playing a gig with guys who Ive been knocking around with for years, I finally worked up the courage to tell them that I was taking a break from playing for a while a years break to be exact to go to three festivals in Ireland every week.

They were confused, and didnt believe me at first, but like so many other people I know, they offered cautious, bemused encouragement and gave me the leeway to hit the road. My mother and sister suffered me being even more flakey than usual, but fair play to them, theyre still there, havent disowned me and are always on hand to offer help and advice. I missed birthdays, stag nights, weddings, trips away and a host of other things that I shouldve been at with friends, but thankfully most of them are still talking to me. Cheers for that.