Galway International Arts Festival

How it began

The festival was founded in 1978 by the Arts Society of University College Galway together with community activists from the Galway Arts Group; the local papers called the first one Galway Arts Society's Week of Craic. Its budget was a thousand euro of Arts Council money, and most of the events took place in an arts centre that is now Sheridans Cheesemongers. In 2014 it took the word International into its name, to reflect a programme that draws from abroad and produces work that travels abroad.

What a festival looks like

The programme runs across theatre, music, visual art, opera, street spectacle, dance, discussion and comedy. In 2018 more than 600 artists took part in over 200 events and attendance passed 250,000, a fifth up on the year before; a new Festival Garden in Eyre Square, with pop-up performances and food stalls, drew 145,000 people on its own. A survey of 2017 visitors put 45 per cent from Galway, 18 per cent from the rest of Ireland and 37 per cent from outside the country.

Music is in the Big Top, the tent raised each year on the Fisheries Field on the university campus, and in the Róisín Dubh, the festival's partner venue: Elvis Costello, Suede, The National, St. Vincent, Philip Glass, David Byrne, Blondie, the Kronos and Brodsky quartets and Bon Iver have all played. The visual arts have brought David Hockney, Bill Viola, Matisse, Patricia Piccinini, Hughie O'Donoghue, David Mach and John Gerrard.

Theatre, and the talks

Enda Walsh's first play, Disco Pigs, which gave Cillian Murphy his first stage role, opened at the festival in 1997, and Walsh's Misterman in 2011 and Ballyturk in 2014 both began here before going abroad; the festival and Dublin's Landmark Productions have made several of his works together. The festival has produced or co-produced more than twenty productions that have toured to London, New York, Edinburgh, Chicago, Adelaide, Sydney, Hong Kong and Washington. The American actor John Mahoney performed regularly from 2000, and the National Theatre, the Royal Court, Steppenwolf, Druid and the Bristol Old Vic have all visited.

Since 2012 the First Thought Talks have gathered scholars, artists, scientists and athletes around each year's theme; in 2018 President Michael D. Higgins opened the series on the theme of Home, and 43 speakers followed. Many of the talks are recorded and can be heard online.