The Ballyshannon Folk Festival (1. – 4. August 2024) is one of the biggest in the country, and this year it will take place for the 47th time!The town will be buzzing with music.
It started in 1977, when Ballyshannon hosted the Fleadh Cheoil. The experience led to the decision to host a non-commercial Trad-festival every year – probably the reason, why it survived, while many of the great festivals at the West Coast gave up after the Folk-Boom of the 70ies and 80ies came to an end.
Ballyshannon lived on and survived the Covid-years as well. The line-up 2024 is impressive, but that is not the whole story: apart from the “official” concerts you will find plenty of music in the pubs and on the streets of Ballyshannon.
Every year the official poster is a must-have souvenir. Since 1980 they are designed by Barry Britton from Rossnowlagh, and this year’s is a cracker once again (if you are not locked into Facebook you need to allow showing of Facebook-content and reload this page to see the picture):
Barry’s family played a pivotal role in introducing Surfing to the northwest of Ireland. His mother bought a couple of surf-boards for the guests of their beach-hotel in Rossnowlagh in the middle of the 1960ies – and kicked off a real transformation of the place to become one of the best-known watersport-centers in the country. The family instigated the first lntercounties Surfing Contest in 1968, and it was Barry’s older Brother Conor who produced the posters for that – until Barry took over in 1971.
So Barry still hand-draws Posters for Sport- and Music-Festivals, one of the last artists of that craft in Europe – in a tradition that produced artists like Alfons Mucha or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. But Barrys designs are naturally not art deco or frivolous french, but very celtic indeed: Do check out his website!
