Festival season: the rhythm of the Irish gig year

Irish live music is seasonal in a way that is easy to miss if you only look at what is on this week. Touring acts route through the island in the autumn and spring, the big outdoor shows and festivals are packed into June, July and August, the trad world has its own summer schools and competitions, and the pub sessions run all year but swell with visitors in summer and with returning emigrants at Christmas. If you know the rhythm, you can plan a trip around the kind of music you want rather than hoping it coincides.

What follows is the year as it usually runs. Specific dates move, line-ups change and festivals come and go, so treat this as the shape rather than the schedule, and use the listings for the detail. Where a festival’s gigs are in our database they carry the festival name on each listing.

The year starts quietly for touring bands and loudly for trad. TradFest in Dublin, held over a long weekend in late January, programmes concerts in churches, historic buildings and the Temple Bar pubs, and it is the best early-year reason to be in the city. February is the slowest month on the island for gigs of any kind, which makes it the cheapest and the easiest to get a ticket. Then the St Patrick’s Festival in mid-March fills Dublin with several days of free outdoor events, and every pub in the country with a stage puts a band on it. If you are visiting for Patrick’s weekend, book everything, including dinner, well in advance, and expect the session pubs to be packed with people who are not there for the music.

Spring is when international tours come through properly: the clubs and theatres fill with acts doing their European runs, and the seated circuit gets its busiest stretch outside the autumn. The May bank holiday weekend is the first of the big outdoor festival weekends, with Kilkenny Roots bringing Americana and roots acts to the pubs and venues of the city, and a number of town festivals around the country using the long weekend. By late May the summer concert series are being announced and the first on-sales for the park shows have happened.

This is the outdoor season. In Dublin, the summer concert series in the city’s parks (Marlay Park, St Anne’s Park, Fairview Park, Malahide Castle, the Iveagh Gardens, the Trinity summer series in the college grounds) bring arena-scale acts outdoors over a run of evenings from June into July; each is a single night with a single headliner rather than a camping festival. In Cork, Live at the Marquee puts a tent on the docklands for the same purpose over several weeks. The June bank holiday brings Forbidden Fruit at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, and the Body & Soul festival in the midlands around the solstice.

July is the arts-festival month. The Galway International Arts Festival takes over that city for a fortnight in mid-to-late July, with the Festival Big Top as its concert venue and the whole town running late; see our Galway guide. Longitude in Marlay Park is the big Dublin pop and hip-hop weekend. And in the first full week of July, the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay, County Clare, becomes the centre of the traditional music world for a week of classes, concerts and sessions in every bar in town. It is not a festival in the usual sense. It is better.

Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the all-Ireland trad competitions, moves between host towns and runs for a week in August, usually around the middle of the month. The competitions are the official reason it exists, but the real event is the town itself: tens of thousands of musicians and listeners, sessions on every corner, in every pub, on the street and in the car parks, from morning until very late. Accommodation within an hour’s drive sells out the year before. If you are serious about trad, go once at least.

The August bank holiday weekend brings All Together Now at Curraghmore in County Waterford, the country’s most carefully curated big camping festival, and then at the end of the month, spilling into the first days of September, Electric Picnic at Stradbally in County Laois, which is the largest. Both sell out well ahead, both are camping-weekend affairs with dozens of stages, and both are the reason the Irish summer feels like it ends at a festival. Smaller roots, blues and country festivals fill the rest of the month’s weekends in towns from Howth to Skibbereen.

September is when the venues wake up. The autumn touring season starts, the clubs and theatres fill their calendars through to December, and the on-sales for the following summer begin. Culture Night, on a Friday in late September, is the single most useful date for free music: hundreds of venues across the island, including many that are normally ticketed, open their doors for free one-off events. Our free music guide has more.

October brings Ireland Music Week in Dublin, the industry showcase where a hundred or so emerging Irish acts play short sets across the city’s clubs for a few days, and then the October bank holiday weekend, which is one of the great weekends in the Irish year. The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival fills Cork’s venues and pubs with a trail of free and ticketed gigs for four days, and Sligo Live does the same for folk and roots in the north-west. Pick one. Book early. Our Cork guide covers the jazz weekend in detail.

The year ends with two things. Other Voices, the television series recorded in a tiny church in Dingle, brings a few days of intimate shows and a music trail of free gigs in the pubs to the Kerry peninsula at the turn of November and December; it is as much about the town as the broadcast. Then, through December, the Irish homecoming season: the country’s own artists, who tour abroad for most of the year, come home for runs of Christmas shows in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Galway. Vicar Street in Dublin, the Ulster Hall in Belfast and Cork Opera House carry a lot of them. These sell out, some of them in minutes, because the audience is everyone who has been waiting since last December.

Then the sessions fill with people home for Christmas, the week between Christmas and New Year is one of the best of the whole year for trad in the pubs, and it starts again with TradFest in January.

• For trad: January (TradFest), the first week of July (Willie Clancy), August (the Fleadh), and Christmas week.
• For big outdoor shows: June and July in the parks and the Marquee, August for the camping festivals.
• For touring bands in clubs and theatres: April–May and September–November.
• For free music: Culture Night in September, the Cork jazz trail in October, and any pub, any night.
• For the cheapest trip: February, when the halls are empty and the hotels are not.

Festival gigs in our listings carry the festival’s name, so searching a county for a given weekend surfaces them alongside the regular shows. Pick a county on the live music hub or use the date filter on Explore, and if you are building a trip around a city, our weekend itinerary guide fills in the nights between.