Condé Nast named Kilkenny one of its Seven Wonders of Ireland last month, under the heading ‘Kilkenny for Culture’.
That recognition has been built over decades by festivals, artists, and communities who turned a small medieval city into one of Ireland’s most culturally alive places.
It lands at exactly the moment the State is quietly walking away from the festivals that built the reputation. Some won’t survive it.
It started not with a dramatic announcement, but with an email.
The email landed in the inbox of Kilkenny Animated, the visual-storytelling festival I co-founded with Paul Young of Cartoon Saloon and which we produce with Lighthouse Studios.
Together those two studios have made Kilkenny one of the world’s significant animation centres, supporting hundreds of jobs.
The email was Fáilte’s response to our application to the Strategic Tourism Festivals Investment Scheme. Remember that word, ‘investment’.
We did the work and pitched for an increase. The email told us our funding will be cut by 25% this year, 25% next year, and 25% the year after.
From €20,000 down to €5,000 in three years. That’s divestment, not investment. And we’re not the only ones.
There has been no announcement that arts festivals are being defunded. The policy just arrived. This is how it happens.
The international guest becomes a domestic one; a new commission becomes a revival of an old one; the producer who does the job of two people starts doing the job of three.
The programme begins to look bog-standard, interest drops, ticket sales narrow. People tell themselves they’ll catch it next year.
Then one year there isn’t a next year. If you can do it on nothing, the thinking goes, you can do it on less.
Tourism moved to a different government department
In 2025, tourism was moved out of the department with responsibility for culture and into the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment.
When Fáilte Ireland sat in the same department as culture, there was at least a working institutional memory that a festival might be worth something beyond a bed night.
Kilkenomics, Cat Laughs, Kilkenny Arts, Kilkenny Animated, the Bram Stoker Festival, Listowel Writers’ Week, Dalkey Book Festival, the Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas.
These events are economically useful, but their point is to change what a place feels like.
Fáilte’s recent funding has gone to seasonal tourism events: Home of Halloween, Púca, New Year’s, and St Patrick’s. Arts-led festivals fit less and less.
The gap reads, on paper, as a bureaucratic choice rather than a value judgement. The comfortable assumption is that the Arts Council will step in.
It can’t. Its budget is stretched, every funding stream oversubscribed.
The notion that it can absorb a wave of festivals suddenly trying to replace up to 75% of their Fáilte income is not a plan. It’s wishful thinking dressed up as joined-up government.
Limited scope of Arts Council
And not every affected festival is a clean fit for the Arts Council anyway. Comedy — until recently, ideas, animation: they fall between.
An arts festival is not a tourism activation with cultural sprinkles on top.
It’s what happens when a small team on an impossible budget decides that putting a particular novelist next to a particular economist in a particular room on a particular day will produce something nobody has heard before.
A novelist beside a neuroscientist. A world premiere in a cathedral. A comedian trying dangerous new material in a pub back room.
An animator in from Tokyo showing work-in-progress to a roomful of fans. These are ways a country knows itself.
This is social architecture. You set the conditions for people who’d otherwise never share a room to do exactly that, and something emerges that nobody planned.
For about 50 years the State was smart enough to put a modest amount of money into the conditions that made it possible. That is what we’re in danger of losing.
Festivals defunded because they don't fit boxes
The festivals at risk aren’t being defunded because they failed. They don’t fit the boxes.
They’re artistic enough to be culturally significant, and economically useful enough to have been part of the tourism story.
That hybrid character is now what makes them vulnerable from both sides. It’s a policy gap. Nobody inside the system owns it, and we’re all going to pay for it.
There are obvious fixes. A transitional fund, triggered when a strategically significant festival takes a single-year cut of more than 20%.
A sub-category for artistically-led festivals with tourism impact, scored on their own terms rather than against food trails and walking weekends.
A no-orphan rule: no festival loses support from one side without the other looking at the full picture.
None of this is expensive. All of it is much cheaper than what we’ll spend 15 years from now, explaining to a new generation why the country’s best festivals all stopped around the same time, and nobody is sure how we let them go.
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