Legendary singer Mary Coughlan holds surprise pop-up gig at Galway International Arts Festival

Irish Independent

17-07-2025

The Galway native appeared in the festival garden alongside guitarist Ultan Conlon for surprise performance at around 1pm and played a mixture of new and old songs, including Lumberjack, Free Fallin' and Delaney.
The crowd continued to grow as news spread of her performance, with familiar faces arriving to the garden's stage to welcome one of Galway's singing heroes back to her old stomping ground.
The pop-up gig occurred one week shy of Mary's first-ever gig at the festival's Heineken Big Top on Wednesday, July 23. Ahead of the gig, she spoke to the Irish Independent of her excitement and the growing nerves as she prepares to play for a huge hometown crowd.
'[I'm feeling] an awful lot of excitement because it's so huge and I know that the class of '72 and '73 are all coming to it, all of them that are left. That's the group I did my Leaving Cert with and the year below.
'I think, collectively, they were involved in convincing the Arts Festival to put seats into the tent this year. They got 400 phone calls to see if they could put seats in, they put them in and then they sold 1,000 tickets in the following few days,' she laughed.
'All of us old people want to sit down, I have to stand up, so I didn't really care. Anyways, we're doing good. We're expecting a lot of the older crowd that I hung around with in Galway.
'I'm very nervous about Wednesday night. There are an awful lot of people coming and I know they'll be expecting a lot – they'll get it as well.'
Hailing from Galway, Mary naturally has a bank of memories from her time growing up on Ashe Road in Shantalla, which helped to inspire her latest album, Repeat Rewind, released in October 2024.
In her early career, Mary battled with alcohol addiction and has remained sober for 33 years. During that period, she says she used to rhyme off the names of Shantalla's streets and the people living in the nearby houses – which inspired name of the album, Repeat Rewind.
Mary also credits Galway city with hosting her most 'special' gig at the infamous Róisín Dubh late-night venue in 1995, with the recordings from the shows used to create her 1996 album, Live in Galway.
'I begged the Roisin Dubh to give me a gig and they said, 'Alright Mary last time you were here you nearly fell off the stage'. I said 'I'm sober now nearly two years', and they said they'd put a small sign behind the counter.
'They rang me a few days later and said, 'We've sold out seven nights and one matinee – will we call it a day at that?' And I said 'OK'. Then I brought in a recording rig, Erik Visser, my producer from Holland, came over with a big band and it became Live in Galway.'
A long-time supporter of GIAF, Mary has seen the festival grow since it was first launched in 1978. She says she is excited to attend some of the gigs and performances during her stay in Galway, including Mikel Murfi's solo show Oh …, which will take place in the main tank of Galway Atlantaquaria.
Having seen the festival in its earliest stages, she fondly remembers her early involvement in the GIAF and notes the magnitude of its growth since its inception.
'I was driving Paul Durcan around schools, he was reading poems. We had a couple of Brian Bourke's paintings up at the county buildings office down on Dominick Street, a couple of gigs at the university that Ollie Jennings put on – and that was the arts festival.
'John Crumlish [GIAF CEO] said to me it's outlasted all of the people who gave it money at the beginning, and three or four of the banks that funded it. It's still flying.'