ARTS FESTIVAL 1974 - 2023 Our Arts Festival – 50 years on One power-ful arts festival (2007)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I feel blessed to live in this historic, beautiful, and cultural city of ours. I feel equally blessed that for fty years, Kilkenny has been hosting a world class Arts Festival (originally known as Arts Week) On this the 50th anniversary of the Festival I present some edited highlights of the wonderful events I have attended, and thoroughly enjoyed, throughout those fty years. My sincere thanks to those who founded the Festival and to all who, for half a century, maintained the momentum presenting rst class cultural events in our city. Finally, my thanks to everyone, not least the many volunteers, who are presently involved in the festival.

BY GERRY MORAN

Another Arts Festival down and thank God for that. Time to recuperate from my annual overdose of culture. And straightaway let me say a big THANK YOU to the sta of e Home Rule Club (the o cial Arts Festival Club) whose hospitality and patience rounded o every performance from piano recitals to poetry readings to political lectures. Hungry, and thirsty artists alike, were all catered for. Highlights of my visitations to e Home Rule were my latenight chats with the assorted folk who assembled there. I especially enjoyed my chat with Samantha Power, the Anna

Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government, whose title alone, would give God an inferiority complex. Ah but this hardened “hack’ did not inch in the line of duty and so I managed an engaging conversation, along with John Cleere, of Cleeres Bar, about politics (among other things) with this Pulitzer Prize winner who delivered the inaugural Hubert Butler lecture to a packed-out St. Canice’s cathedral and who just happens to be an advi sor to Senator Barack Obama, ‘the next President of the United States’ she smilingly remarks, although I’ve never heard of the man!

I also enjoyed spouting about literature and art (no bother to me) with up-and-coming local artists Alan Raggett and Ross Stewart and I loved the bit of palaver with local musician Davy Cashin who, fair dues to him, performed a bit of magic with some beer mats in the wee small hours of the morning. No mean feat, by any means, but that’s the ‘magic’ of Kilkenny’s Arts Festival! And I mustn’t forget the good company of Deputy Mayor, Seán ó hArgáin who also performed magic by being at several festival events at once (or so it seemed). e man is not just a politician but a patron of the arts. I like that combination in a councillor. Apart from the blather, and palaver, below in e Home Rule Club I especially enjoyed the Carducci Quartet in the Castle Tower, Fay Claassen in the River Court Hotel, John McGahern on screen in the Watergate, the Tony & Jane O’Malley exhibition in Callan and visiting the studios of e Endangered Artists in the derelict workhouse in Callan also. But what will linger with me for a long, long time to come was the performance of Eivor Palsdottir, from the Faroe Islands, accompanied by Donal Lunny and his band in the Ormonde Hotel. e passion, the exuberance and the vibrancy of this remarkable young singer, a cross between Heidi and Hiawatha, literally blew me away.

P.S. Senator Barack Obama did go on to become the 44th, and rst Afro-American President of the United States with Samantha Power as an advisor.