Boyle Arts Festival giving locals and visitors a ‘wow factor’

For 11 days, starting tomorrow, Thursday, July 18th, the town of Boyle comes alive as it effectively transforms into an art gallery with the whole community embracing Boyle Arts Festival and Visual Art Exhibition.

This year’s festival will be officially opened one of Boyle’s famous sons, Hollywood star and renowned Broadway and television actor and writer, Chris O’Dowd in King House on Thursday at 8 p.m.. Chris' wife will be interviewed by former RTE news presenter Bryan Dobson as part of the festival.

“We use so many of the facilities around the town. We use empty spaces, courtyards, backyards, community halls, the churches. If you walk into a premises, you will see that the whole town is an art gallery because our art trail has pop-ups everywhere and anywhere. The whole town comes alive!” says Patricia Golden, chairperson of the festival.

Now in its 34th year, Boyle Arts Festival was recently nominated as a county finalist for Roscommon in the Arts & Culture category of the National Lottery Good Causes Awards.

Patricia, who has been involved with the festival since 2003, says National Lottery Good Causes funding received through the Arts Council of Ireland has helped make the festival bigger and better for all, and that it has allowed for subsidised ticket prices, more free events and free access to paid events for minority groups.

“We would always look at how we can best facilitate people at our events. Before, we would have used lots of smaller venues, but the funding allowed us to facilitate larger audiences and diverse audiences,” Patricia says.

“One of the things we did was to invest in making our community hall more of a professional venue. People walked in expecting it to look like the community hall, but it was completely transformed. It was like a proper concert theatre. It gave us such pride. We wanted people to have a wow factor when they came in, and we gave them that. Now we have to give them more this year.” 

And they will. This year, Boyle Arts Festival runs for 11 days from July 18th to 27th – a day longer than last year. King House, a restored Georgian mansion in Boyle, where Patricia works as Arts and Culture Manager, is the home and hub of the festival.

“Over 150 artists are going to exhibit in King House this year in the curated, invitation-only established artists, exhibition. Then we have the open submission amateur artists exhibition at the An Ríoga arts centre, which will feature about 120 artists. We also have the Arts Trail through the town and a total of 60 events taking place,” Patricia says.

As well as the visual arts exhibitions, literature, comedy, drama, workshops, family events and live music all feature across the 11 days of the festival with live performances from Paul Brady, Stockton’s Wing, Rebecca Storm, Eddi Reader and the Alan Kelly gang, Regina Nathan, Brídín, Mack Fleetwood and many others.

The festival is run by a committee of nine volunteers. “We meet every Tuesday from one end of the year to the next for plotting and planning and organising and sometimes blood, sweat and tears. It’s a big responsibility attracting over 15,000 people to a local area with a population of 2,500 and trying to be as inclusive as possible, but it works,” she says.

“From the first week of July all our bunting and banners go up, our signage goes up, and the whole area is alive with colour and excitement, and this builds all the way through until the end of July.” The committee relies on a wider group of volunteers for all of the logistics of running the festival.

 “We have wonderful pool of volunteers, and they look forward to helping us and putting up stages and putting up chairs and sitting at reception desks and booking offices. We have no paid staff. It’s a case of calling on whoever has a trailer or whoever can carry a stage from here to there. There’s so much going on. It’s nearly like a military logistics operation. We couldn’t do this without the community and the businesses that support us,” Patricia says.

“Once the festival starts, people arrive by the coachloads. Everyone is meeting new people and reacquainting with old ones and many of them come here year-on-year. They come from Northern Ireland, from England and from further afield. Some take boats on the Shannon, and they use it as their annual holiday. And many family members that have moved away use this time to come back because there’s so much going on.

"As soon as this year’s festival is finished, the committee will meet to start planning for next year. “It’s a continuous process. There isn’t really a start and a finish. We have already earmarked different performers for next year. We’re continuously looking at how we can make the festival better,” she explains.

Boyle Arts Festival was recently announced as a County Finalist in this year's National Lottery Good Causes  Awards. The awards aim to honour, showcase and celebrate the inspiring work being carried out nationwide by thousands of projects, clubs and individuals who have received support from Good Causes funding.  

Nearly 30 cent in every €1 spent on all National Lottery games goes back to Good Causes in the areas of sport, youth, health, welfare, education, arts, heritage, and the Irish Language. In total more than €6 Billion has been raised for Good Causes since the National Lottery was established 36 years ago. In 2022 alone, €259.5 million was raised for local Good Causes in communities across Ireland.           

Check out the full festival schedule at boylearts.com