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The rockin’ road to Dublin

Lockdown had many strange consequences, but Ireland experienced one that nobody predicted: the kids got into trad.

“It’s weird, you know,” says Mark Downing at Bray, County Wicklow-based booking agency AMA Music, who identifies lockdown scrolling as the reason for traditional Irish music’s re-emergence as a heavy influence on all sorts of new homegrown sounds. “It happened during Covid, without question. It wasn’t there beforehand.”

Irish rock and pop music has, of course, been a major export for decades, from U2 and Thin Lizzy to Boyzone and The Corrs to Hozier and Niall Horan. Sometimes, it has adapted traditional styles. But no one expected Irish folk to offer the next musical path forward in these modern times.

“When I was growing up, if we walked into a pub and a trad band was playing, we’d walk straight out again,” says promoter Peter Aiken. “Maybe the Irish language was beaten out of us, but people didn’t have a great interest. But in June, we put on a new festival with POD, In The Meadows. Lankum headlined it, and nearly 11,000 people there were mesmerised by this Irish music.”

Trad or otherwise, there’s a pride in Irish identity among Ireland’s breakout successes of recent years. Between mutant folk Mercury-winners Lankum, compelling County Cavan singer-songwriter Lisa O’Neill, unstoppable Dublin-specific post-punkers Fontaines D.C., chaotic Belfast hip-hoppers Kneecap, and Dundalk knees-up merchants The Mary Wallopers, music from both sides of Ireland is making no attempt to cover up its roots.

Throw in queer Dublin indie-rockers Pillow Queens, Cork’s Eurovision entrant Bambie Thug, singer-songwriters such as CMAT and Orla Gartland, and these are perhaps the most exciting and diverse times in Irish music for ages.

“2024 is even busier than last year”

On the live side, the market has scarcely cooled since Covid eased. Ireland’s live music revenue reached €243m in 2023 – a 23.5% year-on-year rise, according to PwC’s latest report on the country’s entertainment and media industry.

Aiken Promotions’ seven Springsteen shows in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, and Kilkenny, across two separate visits in 2023 and 2024, mean that the artist sold around 300,000 tickets in the calendar year – on an island of just over 7m inhabitants.

Rammstein, AC/DC, Taylor Swift, P!nk, and Coldplay have also sold out Dublin stadium shows this summer.

Meanwhile, conquering sons Fontaines D.C. will headline Dublin’s 3Arena for two nights in December, to add to a stream of big-name international and domestic shows going through Dublin and Belfast.

“2024 is even busier than last year,” says Ticketmaster Ireland managing director Keith English. “We’ve seen a huge increase in stadium shows. It’s pretty impressive how a small island with around 7m people can host so many large tours – the enthusiasm for live music from Irish fans is really something special.”

Large festivals including Live Nation’s Electric Picnic and Longitude, Aiken/POD’s All Together Now, and Shine’s Belsonic in South Belfast have done good business, even in the face of a summer dominated by stadium headline shows.

“There’s a lot of tickets on sale,” says Will Rolfe of festival promoter POD. “Per capita, it’s probably the highest in Europe, maybe the world.”

“The enthusiasm for live music from Irish fans is really something special”

Dublin, is, of course, the centre of activity, and while Belfast is a great city in its own right, in recent years, it has struggled to grab quite the same share of the biggest tours – as European jaunts have shrunk in size, costs have risen, and other British cities have staked their own claim.

There was no Taylor Swift show in Northern Ireland, and Belfast’s bid for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest – which went to Liverpool – was said to have been sunk by an insufficiently large arena, political instability in Northern Ireland, and concerns about the city’s broader infrastructure. And throw in the fact that the Republic offers a favourable tax regime to visiting acts – zero withholding tax, compared to 20% in Northern Ireland – and the reasons for the disparity become even clearer.

However, clubs such as the Limelight make Belfast a strong incubator of younger careers, and the SSE Arena, Belsonic (with Shania Twain, Take That, Becky Hill, and Sting among this year’s headliners) and the Custom House Square series (PJ Harvey, the Saw Doctors, Pixies, and James Arthur) give opportunities for bigger touring artists. But it is also clear that the global challenges facing tours and festivals haven’t passed Ireland by.

“It’s so much more expensive to get a ferry over; it’s so much more expensive to run the fees for all the staff,” Shine’s Joe Dougan told the BBC last year. “If you had the opportunity to either play Dublin and Belfast or stay in the mainland and add a show in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, or Birmingham – these huge markets that are way bigger than Belfast – you’d just do that instead.”

Nonetheless, plenty have made the trip, and Ireland as a whole bears consideration as one of the more vibrant small markets in Europe.

“That definitely is a new thing: people flying to gigs from all over. I think the world is a lot more accessible now, whether that’s down to Ryanair or easyJet”

Promoters
At the top level, the Irish promoting business is easily viewed as a tussle between Live Nation’s MCD Productions and Aiken Promotions – both of them with substantial legacies and a strong claim to have shaped the game in both the Republic and Northern Ireland – though increasingly there is more to the market.

In any case, this year has found both organisations at full tilt. Peter Aiken sold Bruce Springsteen’s millionth Irish ticket – his father Jim having sold the Boss’s first when he brought him to Slane Castle in 1985 – and other shows this year include Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, John Bishop, and Childish Gambino at the 3Arena, the Live at the Marquee Series in Cork, and any number of smaller concerts, including many at Aiken’s own Vicar Street venue.

“This year has been very strong,” says Aiken. “We had a very good summer, with four outdoors with Bruce and a great success with Rammstein – a big outdoor with them, 40,000 people at RDS Arena. A spectacular show, and people came from all over Europe, big crowd over from the UK. That definitely is a new thing: people flying to gigs from all over. I think the world is a lot more accessible now, whether that’s down to Ryanair or easyJet.”

MCD/Live Nation has Electric Picnic and the pop and hip-hop-leaning Longitude at Marlay Park, but its interests are broad, from Taylor Swift, Coldplay, and AC/DC’s Croke Park shows and plenty of arena, theatre, and club concerts to the Galway Airport Summer Sessions in August, whose acts included James Arthur, Pixies, and local heroes The Coronas at a 4,999-site at the long-closed airport.

The promoter, which is responsible for Oasis’s reunion shows at Croke Park next August, sold 120,000 tickets for nine concerts at the 15,000-cap Virgin Media Park in Cork in June, featuring Becky Hill, Sting, Take That, Shania Twain, and The Wolfe Tones. It also hosted Snow Patrol, Paolo Nutini, and Liam Gallagher in three 30,000-cap live events over one weekend at Thomond Park in Limerick, selling more than 75,000 tickets.

“It will be a big moment for us, for the band”

Denis Desmond, co-founder of MCD and Live Nation chairman, UK and Ireland, predicted this year that MCD would sell three million tickets in Ireland in 2024 – 50% more than last year. Speaking to IQ, he addresses the Irish market as a part of a thriving region, and focuses on the summer’s festivals.

“We’ll host a total of almost 5m attendees at Live Nation’s UK and Irish festivals this summer, and MCD is having a great year, too,” he tells IQ. “Ticket demand remains high. Electric Picnic sold out. All this demonstrates that festivals remain vital to our cultural life.”

As well as the big beasts, Ireland has always had smaller promoters, too, but the new challengers are more muscular than before.

Singular Artists emerged out of the pandemic, launched by former Aiken promoters Fin O’Leary, Brian Hand, and Simon Merriman. A 2020 concert series, Wider Than Pictures at the National Museum of Ireland’s Collins Barracks, got the company on its way with shows by Alt-J, Simply Red, and Fleet Foxes, and the new company, backed by DEAG’s UK operation KMJ Entertainment, has taken flight since.

“We were lucky that a lot of the artists we have built relationships with over the years have continued to work with us,” says Merriman. “That’s how Singular really took off.”

A first 3Arena show in 2022, for Yungblud, took them up a notch, and among Singular’s shows in the second half of this year were the next Wider Than Pictures shows (Deacon Blue, The The, James, Gossip, and James Blunt), and the Fontaines D.C. homecoming shows at the 3Arena, which will represent a high point, says Merriman.

“We have sold over 26,000 tickets with them, which is absolutely fantastic,” he says. “It will be a big moment for us, for the band.”

“If you come in after the show with a tray of Guinness… you are rewarded as a promoter”

Singular works from the smallest gigs up to far larger ones, and Merriman is passionate about helping artists along the journey from the former to the latter. He recalls promoting the first Khruangbin show at the 300-capacity Workmans Club in 2016 and notes with satisfaction that the Texan band will play the 3Arena in November. As far as he is concerned, the clubs are where it all begins.

“It’s crucial for our business, because that’s the roots and the basis of what we do,” says Merriman. “That’s where your relationships start. You want to take a personal approach, and you want them to know who you are. The first shows for bands, they are usually the ones they remember. And if you come in after the show with a tray of Guinness or you bring them out for a meal when they don’t have a lot of money – if you put in the time and the effort, you are rewarded as a promoter.”

POD’s own festival history goes back to 2004, when its founder, the late John Reynolds, launched Electric Picnic. A frequent partner of Aiken Promotions, POD presides over three festivals: the three-day All Together Now on the Curraghmore Estate, County Waterford; Forbidden Fruit, the Dublin city-centre festival at Royal Hospital Kilmainham; and new arrival In The Meadows, on the same site.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a golden year. I think festivals globally have had challenges, and those haven’t not impacted Ireland,” says Rolfe. “You just need to be at the top of your game and produce really good shows. The summer is definitely more geared towards outdoor concerts now than it is outdoor festivals, but there’s still a handful that are really strong, and thankfully, we have three of them.”

The original company had well-publicised ups and downs but now stands as a rare smaller operator in a small pond with a couple of notably big fish. “It is definitely a competitive market – just less people being competitive,” says Rolfe.

Selective Memory is another busy smaller promoter, bringing acts including Michael Head & the Red Elastic Band, Joan As Policewoman, Kelly Lee Owens, Stereo MC’s, and Hugh Cornwell to Dublin this autumn and winter.

“When women continue to be overlooked on the airwaves, it leads to a significant lack of representation on festival lineups”

Irish talent
While Irish artists new and old continue to see plenty of success, there is also evidence that such success sometimes isn’t terribly evenly distributed.

Advocacy group Why Not Her? has waged a campaign for five years to address the gender imbalance on Irish radio playlists and challenge what founder Linda Coogan Byrne identifies as Irish music’s “conventional straight white male narrative.” Figures released in June this year, for example, revealed that just one living female Irish artist – Dublin DJ and artist Jazzy – made the Top 100 on Irish radio in the preceding 12 months. Coogan Byrne says the trend is inevitably reflected in the live arena.

“When women continue to be overlooked on the airwaves, it leads to a significant lack of representation on festival lineups,” she says. “However, the recent success of artists like CMAT and Jazzy is an interesting anomaly. Their rise shows that when radio genuinely supports female artists, they do break through to festival lineups and even headline their own arena and open-air concerts.

Ireland Music Week, founded in 2003 and run by First Music Contact with funding from Culture Ireland and The Arts Council, does aim for a 50/50 gender balance. Its showcases sift through 750 applications for 50 slots, and in the past have included Fontaines D.C., Hozier, The Coronas, CMAT, Villagers, Pillow Queens and numerous others. It returns to venues across Dublin in October with gigs, workshops and talks.

Despite a healthy upswing in the profile of folk sounds, folk musicians in general often struggle to get on the radar, too. Your Roots Are Showing, Ireland’s folk music industry conference, which had its third year this year, was established specifically to build ties between Irish musicians and the industry.

“Local folk musicians in Ireland do have a hard time getting their music heard if they’re not already kind of popular,” says co-founder and executive director Charlene Sloan. “You go into most any pub and you just think, ‘Oh my gosh, why aren’t these people on the radio? Why aren’t they booking tours?’ And a lot of it is lack of understanding of the music business.

“People talk about the resurgence of Irish folk music, but I think it’s always been there”

Nonetheless, the undercurrent of native music is very evidently part of what fuels Ireland’s success in the broader pop and rock business, and creative director Brendan McCreanor, himself an uilleann piper and whistle-player, is heartened by its renewed popularity among a new generation.

“People talk about the resurgence of Irish folk music, but I think it’s always been there,” he says. “It might have taken different forms, but it’s become really popular now, from kids to teenagers to people in their 20s and 30s. It’s really cool now, and so is the Irish language.”

AMA Music books Irish artists internationally and at home, with The Coronas, Paddy Casey, Brian Kennedy, Gilbert O’Sullivan, and The 4 of Us on the books, as well as new Irish artists including The New Leaves, Fake Friends, and Kiera Dignam, daughter of late Aslan frontman Christy Dignam. “Some of the best music I have ever heard in my life is coming out now,” says Downing.

He ruefully notes the toll Covid took on the industry at the lower level. “It’s really only the last few months we are seeing those bookings come back,” he says. “Normal working musicians had no work for three years. It was criminal.”

And while the post-Covid business is clearly booming at the top end, Downing suggests the cost of living is also reshaping gig-going habits in the regional areas that supply travelling audiences for Dublin shows.

“A lot of people now don’t want to take a taxi into the city if it’s going to cost them €100 there and back,” he says. “So, if an artist is playing locally now, they might go to see that for €50 rather than 200 or 250 quid for a night out in the city.”

Demand for festival tickets may not be equal to that of outdoor headline shows, but they remain a decent market

Festivals
Electric Picnic, in Stradbally, County Laois, remains very much the biggest festival in Ireland, and this year’s incarnation was larger than ever, rapidly selling out 75,000 tickets – an increase of 5,000 on 2023.

At this year’s event, headlined by Noah Kahan, Calvin Harris, and Kylie, there was talk of possible further growth next year, albeit of a modest kind.

Demand for festival tickets may not be equal to that of outdoor headline shows, but they remain a decent market, and Ireland has them at all levels, from the huge and mainstream to the small and specialist.

Among the notable local and independent names are Donegal’s Sea Sessions, Dublin’s TradFest, Meath’s Otherside, Dingle’s TV-driven Other Voices (which releases its tickets through local and national competitions), and art and food festival Beyond The Pale in County Wicklow.

Times are challenging for festivals, of course, and not every significant one has come out to play this year. The independent Body & Soul in Ballinlough took a year off but returns in 2025, as does the Indiependence Music & Arts Festival in Mitchelstown, County Cork.

Of the three POD festivals, In The Meadows hit the ground running in 2024, with more than 10,000 tickets sold. Forbidden Fruit, which featured Nelly Furtado, Nia Archives, Bicep, and Freddie Gibbs, got 15,000 a day across two days, while All Together Now, launched by Reynolds the year before his untimely death in 2018, hit 25,000 with The National, The Prodigy, and Jorja Smith coming to Portlaw across four days.

“This is not just a reflection of the festival but of a broader industry problem where systemic biases continue to marginalise these voices”

“All Together Now still feels like a relatively new festival, given the two years off,” says Rolfe. “We feel like we have been in a restart since Covid and maybe next year feels like an opportunity to kick on a bit in terms of capacity and working on taking it up another level. It is a very exciting prospect, a very unique site.

“In The Meadows is going to come back for a second year, and we know we will really need to excite people with it. Lankum had a very special year, and that was the right thing at the right time. We have expectations to work with somebody different next year and deliver a really strong show.”

Across the border, Belfast comes not far behind Dublin in appetite for festivals. Research published in April by economist Chris Carey and live entertainment consultant Tim Chambers found that the 2023 editions of Belsonic and electronic music festival Emerge generated additional economic activity amounting to £30.8m and created almost 6,000 paid employment opportunities in the city and beyond.

Belsonic, in the city’s Ormeau Park, and Emerge, in Boucher Fields, attract more than 200,000 paid attendees between them, with ticket holders travelling from as far away as Australia and the US.

But while festivals maintain a healthy audience in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, Coogan Byrne believes there is still work to do if the average Irish festival is to catch up with the progressive, gender-balanced mood elsewhere in the sector.

“There has been some effort, but it’s often too little and too late,” she says. “A few festivals have made strides towards balancing their lineups, but it’s still not the standard practice it should be. Events like Body & Soul and All Together Now are making some progress, but when compared to international standards, we’re still lagging.”

Electric Picnic secured Kylie for this year, and she was joined by Raye at the top of the bill, but Coogan Byrne isn’t impressed. “Electric Picnic, as Ireland’s premier music festival, has long been criticised for its gender disparity, with male-dominated lineups that often push female and non-binary artists to the fringes,” she says. “This is not just a reflection of the festival but of a broader industry problem where systemic biases continue to marginalise these voices.”

In genre terms, numerous small festivals undeniably work hard to amplify the voices of specialist and traditional musicians.

“It’s supporting the grassroots of Ireland, but it’s also supporting the grassroots of the artists”

One of those is Westport Folk & Bluegrass Festival on the west coast in County Mayo, which celebrated its 15th event this June with a headline show from Rhiannon Giddens and a mostly free programme of carefully curated bluegrass sessions and events in hotels, theatres, churches, and pubs around the town.

“We have four paying concerts, but the bands that play those more often than not play some free gigs as well,” says founder Uri Kohen, who started the festival in 2007 and has built an event with an international reputation and strong ties with the bluegrass community around the world.

“We’re widely regarded as the leading bluegrass festival in Ireland, and even on a European level, we’re among the names that are mentioned outside the US,” he says. “We work very, very hard to maintain a certain level and do new things.”

The festival is a non-profit, with a variety of funding streams, from grants to sponsorship to ticket sales, and it draws between 1,000 and 1,500 visitors to the town, with a cumulative audience of 3,000 across all shows.

“At least 40% come from overseas,” says Kohen. “We have major appeal in the US and the UK. This year, we had a couple who came for the fourth time from Australia.”

Bluegrass owes key elements of its DNA to the fiddle music brought to the Appalachian region by Irish and Scottish migrants, and the ongoing health of traditional music means that global cross-pollination continues into the present day.

Your Roots Are Showing aims to make connections between Irish artists and local and international festivals but also to hook international Irish acts into the same network, and it has found Irish music in the most unexpected places.

“We had an Irish traditional trio from Japan that came over, O’Jizo, and they were booked for the Milwaukee Irish Fest, but they were also booked into festivals around Ireland,” says Sloan. “And I think that’s also important because it’s supporting the grassroots of Ireland, but it’s also supporting the grassroots of the artists.”

“These last two years have been the two biggest years we have ever had”

Venues
Approaching 16 years on from its construction on the site of The Point, the 13,000-capacity 3Arena in Dublin’s Docklands is at a peak.

“These last two years have been the two biggest years we have ever had,” says general manager Cormac Rennick. “With a fair wind, we are going to do 128, 129 shows this year – there’s a couple we’re waiting on. That’s not really driven by many big runs. We are doing Mamma Mia! the musical, but the rest is just a lot of different shows.”

The venue’s calendar is a picture of health, gathering up most of the key tours now doing the rounds, with little pause for breath. A single week in November offers up The Corrs, Interpol, Kasabian, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and The Script. “It’s hard to put your finger on an explanation for it, really, because we are supposed to be in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, but entertainment seems to be about the last thing that people give up,” says Rennick. “You can’t afford your foreign holiday, but you are still going to go to a few gigs.”

The 3Arena grabs a share of much of the arena-scale activity on the island of Ireland, though Belfast’s SSE Arena has plenty to say for itself.

“It certainly feels like a good year, with our diary filling up with several exciting world-class touring productions, alongside our local sport, ice hockey, and comedy offerings,” says Claire Cosgrave, associate director of experience, arena and estate at The Odyssey Trust, whose properties include the arena as well as other attractions in the city’s waterfront Titanic Quarter.

“The last quarter of the year is going to be incredible for us”

“We are incredibly proud that Les Misérables will not only be bringing its global phenomenon to Belfast but that The SSE Arena, Belfast will be the production’s first stop, kicking off with nine days of performances throughout September,” she adds.

Outside the big cities, the Gleneagle INEC Arena in Country Kerry plays a unique role, serving the surrounding area and drawing visitors

from far and wide, aided by on-site hotels that can accommodate 1,000 and Kerry Airport 20km up the road.

The largest music venue in the Republic of Ireland outside of Dublin, the arena can absorb an audience of 4,100 and regularly welcomes leading Irish acts, musicals, family shows, and international artists – who are able to road-test their touring productions and warm up with club shows in the 600-cap INEC Club or the 1,000-cap Gleneagle Ballroom.

Like most indoor venues, the Gleneagle INEC Arena had a relatively quiet summer, but it makes up for it with a packed Q4 that will see an A-Z of Irish touring talent, including The Mary Wallopers, Kneecap, The Coronas, Gavin James, Gemma Hayes, Villagers, and James Vincent McMorrow.

“The last quarter of the year is going to be incredible for us,” says arena director Mark Egan. “In December, we would usually do about 30,000 people. This year, it looks like we’re going to do 64,000 people.”

“From a fan experience perspective, because they’re in a smaller venue, they get a better bang for their buck”

The venue programmes around 80% of its own shows, though it works with outside promoters as well and covers off a large part of the country that might balk at a trip all the way to the capital. “I think, from a fan experience perspective, because they’re in a smaller venue, they get a better bang for their buck,” says Egan. “Our tickets would be more cost effective than Dublin, and if you live somewhere like Kerry or Cork, we’re a lot more accessible.”

For the Irish acts that make up 70% of the arena’s shows, the Gleneagle INEC is a staple of an Irish tour. “What we do find is that a band will do Killarney, Dublin, and Belfast,” he says, and he takes pride in the venue’s international fans as well.

“We recently had a large international act I can’t name yet, who approached a promoter in Ireland and said, I want to play the INEC in Killarney. And we didn’t have the date. So the artist went back to the agent – big artist – and said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to reroute the tour in some way because I am definitely playing the INEC.’”

Cork, meanwhile, remains arena-less, despite a long-delayed plan for a 6,000-cap, Live Nation-operated Cork Event Centre. Government funding has apparently been the sticking point, and the project has languished for over a decade, though recent months have, not for the first time, promised an imminent decision.

In the meantime, Limerick, Galway, and Derry have been mooted as likely candidates for similar venues, though the wait goes on.

 


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