Macnas
On a Halloween night in Galway the crowd lines the streets for hours before the drums are heard, and then the giants come: towering puppets, fire, masks, a thousand performers. This is Macnas, the Irish word for frolicking, the performance company from the Fisheries Field that has changed what a parade means in Ireland since 1986.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Sharonlflynn, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Fisheries Field, Eyre Square on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Pioneering, inventive and radical
Founded in 1986, Macnas has been described as pioneering, inventive and radical, and is credited with changing the nature of public entertainment in the country. Its parades were long the centrepiece of the Galway International Arts Festival and are now the heart of the city's Halloween and St Patrick's Day, with crowds of up to 50,000 in the streets.
Beyond Galway
The company toured with U2 on the Zoo TV tour in 1993. On the last night of 1999 it helped ring in the millennium in three cities at once, in Eyre Square, in Dublin's Merrion Square and in Times Square in New York. In March 2016 it opened SXSW in Austin, Texas, and in November 2017 it closed the Land of Green Ginger programme of Hull's year as UK City of Culture. It has performed in more than twenty countries.
Where Macnas lives
Administration and rehearsals are at the Fisheries Field on the university campus by the Corrib, where the arts festival raises its Big Top; the large-scale building of the giants happens in a warehouse elsewhere in the city. The model on this page pins the Fisheries Field and the streets the parades come down.
Questions people ask
When is the Macnas parade?
What is Macnas?
Did Macnas tour with U2?
Written from Wikipedia, "Macnas" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.