Weekend fun in Cork: five fun things to do across the Rebel County
Here are five things to do across the Rebel county over the coming days:
Cars and Coffee event in aid of Slí Eile at Burton Park, Mallow on Saturday June 28
All roads lead to Mallow this weekend for petrol heads as Cars and Coffee North Cork will hold a morning of coffee, baked goods and live music.
Vintage, classic and modern cars will be on show at the event, organised to raise funds for mental health charity Slí Eile.
For more information on the event, call 089 233 2492.
West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry, June 27 – July 6
Bantry's renowned West Cork Chamber Music Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with a line-up of stunning string quartets.
Five international quartets are set to be the star acts of the festival.
These include the Doric Quartet from the UK, the Ardeo Quartet comprised of musicians from Japan, France and South Korea, Ukraine's Tchalik Quartet, the Marmen Quartet and the Chiaroscuro Quartet.
Throughout the week-long event, there will be free, family-friendly concerts on the islands of Whiddy, Sherkin, Bere and Heir, as well as at unusual venues across the region.
The full festival programme can be viewed here.
Jake Carter with special guest Aimee Twomey at the Briery Gap in Macroom, Sunday June 29
The Briery Gap will host the final leg of Jake Carter's Point of View tour with local woman Aimee Twomey taking to the stage as a special guest on the night.
The concert promises to be a great night, which will delight country fans.
Jake Carter will bring a star quality to Macroom, while Aimee Twomey will have the backing of her hometown.
Marketing manager at the Briery Gap Doireann Fitzgerald said supporting emerging talent is the venue's 'goal'.
'In our goal of supporting national and also emerging talent, we have Macroom's own Aimee Twomey as support act on the night,' Ms Fitzgerald said.
'Aimee will be performing a mix of covers as well as some of her own writing.'
Tickets for the concert are €22 each and are available at brierygap.ie.
Ballinagree Vintage and Family Fun Day on Sunday, June 29
Locals and visitors are invited to a day of live music and competitive and non-competitive races, including the crowd favourite dog show, at Ballinagree.
The day will also offer mini digger challenges, a penalty shootout, the dreaded 'hold tough' contest and an egg throwing competition.
A raffle will take place on the day with proceeds raised to go to local charities.
Organisers have recommended that people come armed with a picnic blanket and wear their biggest smiles to soak up the great community spirit promised on the day.
Dara O'Briain at Live at the Marquee on Sunday, June 29
One of Ireland's most loved comedians Dara O'Briain will bring his Re:Creation tour to the Marquee on Sunday night.
The Wicklow man is back on the touring scene after a hugely successful 2023 tour titled So, Where Were We? – which sold out 173 shows across 20 countries.
The advert for the show says 'Dara is back doing his favourite thing: telling stories and creating madness'.
Tickets for the event can be purchased from Ticketmaster for €45 each.
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Irish Independent
17 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Weekend fun in Cork: five fun things to do across the Rebel County
Here are five things to do across the Rebel county over the coming days: Cars and Coffee event in aid of Slí Eile at Burton Park, Mallow on Saturday June 28 All roads lead to Mallow this weekend for petrol heads as Cars and Coffee North Cork will hold a morning of coffee, baked goods and live music. Vintage, classic and modern cars will be on show at the event, organised to raise funds for mental health charity Slí Eile. For more information on the event, call 089 233 2492. West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Bantry, June 27 – July 6 Bantry's renowned West Cork Chamber Music Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with a line-up of stunning string quartets. Five international quartets are set to be the star acts of the festival. These include the Doric Quartet from the UK, the Ardeo Quartet comprised of musicians from Japan, France and South Korea, Ukraine's Tchalik Quartet, the Marmen Quartet and the Chiaroscuro Quartet. Throughout the week-long event, there will be free, family-friendly concerts on the islands of Whiddy, Sherkin, Bere and Heir, as well as at unusual venues across the region. The full festival programme can be viewed here. Jake Carter with special guest Aimee Twomey at the Briery Gap in Macroom, Sunday June 29 The Briery Gap will host the final leg of Jake Carter's Point of View tour with local woman Aimee Twomey taking to the stage as a special guest on the night. The concert promises to be a great night, which will delight country fans. Jake Carter will bring a star quality to Macroom, while Aimee Twomey will have the backing of her hometown. Marketing manager at the Briery Gap Doireann Fitzgerald said supporting emerging talent is the venue's 'goal'. 'In our goal of supporting national and also emerging talent, we have Macroom's own Aimee Twomey as support act on the night,' Ms Fitzgerald said. 'Aimee will be performing a mix of covers as well as some of her own writing.' Tickets for the concert are €22 each and are available at Ballinagree Vintage and Family Fun Day on Sunday, June 29 Locals and visitors are invited to a day of live music and competitive and non-competitive races, including the crowd favourite dog show, at Ballinagree. The day will also offer mini digger challenges, a penalty shootout, the dreaded 'hold tough' contest and an egg throwing competition. A raffle will take place on the day with proceeds raised to go to local charities. Organisers have recommended that people come armed with a picnic blanket and wear their biggest smiles to soak up the great community spirit promised on the day. Dara O'Briain at Live at the Marquee on Sunday, June 29 One of Ireland's most loved comedians Dara O'Briain will bring his Re:Creation tour to the Marquee on Sunday night. The Wicklow man is back on the touring scene after a hugely successful 2023 tour titled So, Where Were We? – which sold out 173 shows across 20 countries. The advert for the show says 'Dara is back doing his favourite thing: telling stories and creating madness'. Tickets for the event can be purchased from Ticketmaster for €45 each.
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Irish Examiner
Francis Humphrys: Magic moments from 30 years of West Cork Chamber Music Festival
'I'm not sure I could pull something out of my rather decrepit brain,' protests Francis Humphrys when asked to list some highlights of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which this year celebrates its 30th birthday. And the response can only be: pull the other one. He may recently have posted his own 80th birthday but Humphrys still seems as sharp as ever, and has just the finishing touches to the official programme for this year's festival, which begins on June 27 next and continues until July 6. The latest programme has 146 pages; by comparison, the edition for the first Festival back in 1995 had 56 pages - 'which wasn't bad'. Humphrys is chief executive officer of West Cork Music, which plans and stages three festivals every year in and around Bantry: The Chamber Music Festival, the Literary Festival, and the Masters of Tradition Festival, and his memories of the very first Festival - complete with his property deeds in the bank as collateral - are still vivid and coloured by the topsy turvy adventures of the years that have since passed, marked by fretting over budgets and scoring new, emerging and big names from the world of classical music and beyond, successfully cloistering them in West Cork for a few weeks. It's quite an achievement, even if he jokes that '30 years is chicken feed'. Below are some of the highlights, but as he explains: 'The most captivating concerts in the festival are the late nights, especially the ones in Bantry House. We've got the candles lit and all that. It works, it works very well." Bantry House provides an impressive setting for many of the events at West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Picture: Denis Scannell 1995: Seamus Heaney "I think the first festival is a place to go, because what's interesting there is the seeds of the Literary Festival are also sown, because our big event was Seamus Heaney coming, and that was the year that Seamus won the Nobel Prize. A number of gods were smiling on us that year. "I did invite Seamus, but long before the Nobel Prize came on, but that really put us on the radar, in a way. I don't think we would have been otherwise. Bantry House [used as a venue] was a great attraction. "I asked Seamus to come and read a long poem of his called Squarings [made up of 48 12-line poems]. And we did it alongside a very, very good cellist playing Bach's last Cello Suite. So there is a movement of the cello suite, and then Seamus would read, and then another movement, and Seamus would read, and so on. It was a packed house, and it went very well. He's such a gentleman, that man. He was wonderful. After he'd won the Nobel prize, he rang me up and said, 'Francis, I'm still coming'. That was good. Obviously, he was being dragged all over the world at that particular point in time." Seamus Heaney on one of his visits to Bantry. Picture: Eddie O'Hare Ten years later, and Seamus Heaney's return to Bantry again lit up the festival. "The thing about 2005, which was the 10th festival, it was also Cork Capital of Culture [European City of Culture]. We put on some fabulous programs, of which the Seamus piece was one. They gave us a bit of extra money to expand the artistic program. But it's always been like that with a festival. I go to these board meetings. We have a board, and I go to the meeting and say, the money will come. It just sort of parachutes in at the last minute, but, I mean, you really had to work on that European funding, but we had done the groundwork, if you like, we were there already. We just had to put it down in a funding application." 2010: Alina Ibragimova Russian-British violinist Alina Ibragimova playing in Bantry. "It's just fantastic having people come to Bantry. It really is, it's people who play to full houses in the great halls all over Europe. With Alina Ibragimova, she is another violinist who's been with us. The first time she came, she came outside the festival and she did all the Bach solo Sonatas and all the Bach solo pieces, the solo violin. She did them for us in the local churches. And not that long ago, she did them all in the Albert Hall to an audience of 1,000 people. And she comes almost every year. She has a string quartet who are coming back this year. They were here last year, she's been here almost every year now for 10 or 15 years.' Humphrys recalls a show many years ago at Bantry House when Ibragimova performed a late night Schubert piano triumvia: 'People came out ... I mean… people were dumbfounded.' 2011: Nicola Benedetti Nicola Benedetti was one of the headliners at the 2011 festival. (Photo by Jeff) "Well, that obvious special person was Nicola Benedetti. The reason why I try and try to steer away a bit from this is that there are names that are famous to me and famous to chamber musicians, but the rest of the world hasn't heard of them. I think that's the problem with chamber music. It is a niche area. Nicola runs the Edinburgh Festival now. She's internationally famous, a fabulous musician herself, and she's done a huge amount for development of young musicians in England, and in the UK generally. "You need people like her, big names like her, to generate private funding. She was great. She came two or three years. She came first with her then-boyfriend, who's a cellist, and they enjoyed being here. She could sit outside and not be bothered by people because she wasn't really known over here, you know, the music audience would have known who she was, but it's a great thing. You know, in Ireland, celebrities don't get pestered in the way they do elsewhere." 2023: Candle-light concerts "The festival keeps an archive of all the works played and who played them. Currently after 29 Festivals there are 3,200 entries, ranging from under 50 works the first year to over 120 in recent years. Of course many works get repeated several times, especially the unrivalled quartets by that wave of composers beginning with the founder of the string quartet Haydn, his friend Mozart, Haydn's student Beethoven, who upset their orderly world and of course the song-writer Schubert. "My favourite concerts have always been the candle-lit late-nights, a focus on a single work, the darkening sky outside and a deeply attentive audience. Two years ago the Paris-based (Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam are the great music cities of our time) Quatuor Ardeo, who return this year, gave a mesmerising performance of a Beethoven quartet composed in 1806, when Napoleon was imposing his will on Europe with his armies. This particular quartet, his Ninth, builds to a stupendous last movement climax delivered in overwhelming fashion by these four young women. Thus their return this year." The Vanbrugh Quartet were regulars at the festival. Picture: Des Barry 2025: New visitors Can you have a favourite memory from something that haunt happened yet? Maybe you can, and if so, it's testament to the power of music. "It's not exactly the festival, but I was 80 last year, and my daughter, unbeknown to me, arranged a birthday party, and she also brought in a string quartet, and they played, and all the neighbours were there. And one of the neighbours was so taken by the performance by this string quartet that she's booked to come to a concert in the festival. So it does reach. You just have to get people to hear, to listen. You have to drag them in somehow or other. And that's where Bantry House came in, in the early days: people came to hear classical music in the kind of surroundings that it would have been played in 100 years ago or 200 years ago. "What we found actually since covid is that our international audience has halved, they're not coming any more for many, many reasons. And I think that's true with all tourism, but our national audience has doubled. So people are kind of thinking, yes, this might be fun to go to." The 30th West Cork Chamber Music Festival takes place from June 27 to July 6. See
Irish Examiner
08-06-2025
- Irish Examiner
Culture That Made Me: Writer Paula Meehan selects her touchstones
Born in 1955, Paula Meehan grew up in inner-city Dublin and Finglas. In 1984, she published Return and No Blame, the first of several acclaimed poetry collections. In 2013, she was installed as Ireland's professor of poetry by President Michael D Higgins. She has written plays for stage and radio, and her poetry has been set to music by Christy Moore, among others. She will be at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Monday, June 30, 10pm, for a collaboration with the Chiaroscuro Quartet at St Brendan's Church. Jenny A book that fired my imagination aged about six was Paul Gallico's Jenny. He wrote about the animal sphere. A young boy, Peter, wakes up and he's turned into a cat. He has fur and paws instead of hands. He strikes up a relationship with an older cat called Jenny. She teaches him how to be a cat, like how to reach the weird parts of his body with his tongue. I remember some of the phrases from it, like 'When in doubt, wash'. They become sea cats, and they go off on great adventures. The book is so quirky, strange, and magical. I always loved the idea of turning into an animal. Mark Twain I was a bookish child. I was fed the classics. I loved Mark Twain's books. Tom Sawyer, for instance, is raised by a religious, conservative aunt. I found myself living in a theocracy. I was beginning to read about the culture I was being raised in. We inherited the English class system, the minute calibrations of class. Meehan says she loved author Mark Twain's books as a child. Picture: The Mark Twain House & Museum. As a kid growing up, I became more aware of these gradations. Did you live in a tenement in the inner city or in a private house? It was tuppence looking down on a 'ha'penny. Systems oppressed people from my background. I related to Twain's characters, Tom and Huck, and their rebellious spirit. Sean O'Casey Sean O'Casey was a sublime dramatist. My roots go back into the heart of the north inner city, into Monto. I knew the characters in his tenement plays. They were all around me. They nourished me. His politics also nourished me. He had great empathy for women struggling in poverty. What chimed with me about O'Casey's plays — and the characters in them, who break into a song at the drop of a hat — as I looked around, was you were only as good as your story. If you've fuck-all else, then your ability to tell a story, and hold attention, sing a song, give a spiel or a raiméis, becomes your character. It's part of your stock in trade or your wealth. The Confirmation Suit I love Brendan Behan's story The Confirmation Suit. My mother was a gifted handywoman. She'd embroider, knit, and crochet. She cut down old coats for me, weird creations. Paula Mehan says she loves Brendan Behan's story The Confirmation Suit. Picture:. I was so ashamed going around in what I called in a poem once 'the stigma of the second hand'. The Confirmation Suit is a similar kind of realisation — Behan realising the woman who made (burial) shrouds made his confirmation suit. He's mortified, but at her funeral, he walks in the rain, wearing the confirmation suit. That hit my heart — the children of the poor, the sense of shame at their poor clothes. Joni Mitchell When I was coming on 17, I listened to Joni Mitchell's album Blue [on a loop]. As teenagers in Finglas, we were music mad. Psychedelics were hitting our youth culture, and a lot of influence from American poets. I remember going on a south of France festival tour with Colm Tóibín, back in the '90s, and we sang the whole Blue album together because we had it off by heart. Each song is gravened into my memory. I learned a lot of my poetry lines from her — how to hook a line, to stall a line, the force of a line. A master craftswoman. Gary Snyder and the eastern mind I love the American poet Gary Snyder. He was 95 in May. I dedicated my selected poems in Japanese to him. He had a huge influence on my young, hungry poetry mind. His essays from the '50s are still radical. He opened the door to Japanese poetry — like Bashō, the great haiku master — and to a rapturous love and understanding of nature. Through his studies in Zen Buddhism, he opened the eastern mind to me. We were a very spaced-out generation, between books like Timothy O'Leary's The Politics of Ecstasy and Alan Watts — the great commentator on Buddhism — who wrote you must be careful of 'climbing up the signpost instead of following the road'. Eavan Boland Eavan Boland is a pure lyric singer. Her lines sing. I'm a dedicated lyric poet. The song in the poem is what turns me on. Paula Meehan describes Eavan Boland, pictured, as "a pure lyric singer". Picture: Maura Hickey. She stood up in the time when it was very difficult, as a woman poet, to have parity of esteem. She banged the table. She challenged why all the grants went to the guys. She challenged the culture of publishing where if you opened anthologies, magazines, you would hardly see a woman's name. Now that has changed completely. Thomas McCarthy I'm a great fan of Thomas McCarthy, a seriously good poet based in Cork. I love his work. He's an unbelievable encourager. One of his early lines is his wish, 'to place art anonymously at the Earth's altar'. I love that sense of service. In the folk tradition, you notice the number of times 'Anonymous' appears under lyrics, especially women's songs. To lose ego, to put all your devotion, craft, and intelligence into the poem itself, struck a note with me. If you put all your energy like Native Americans and their medicine bundles, or indigenous people with their power objects, into making the thing as good and powerful as you can, it will draw what you need to you. Translations Brian Friel's Translations is a great play for understanding the colonised mind. Hugh, the hedge-school master, heads off to join the rebellion with his sidekick. They're coming down from Donegal, walking the roads with their pikes on their shoulders, to meet the French in Sligo and revolt against the colonial master. There's a lovely line where he says: 'And it was there, in Phelan's pub, that we got homesick for Athens, just like Ulysses.' Because they spoke Greek, Latin, and Irish, they got lost in the drink and Homer, and all the great playwrights. That spoke to me about how useless artists can sometimes be in the political realm and how useless political power can be in the artists' realm. Z I remember seeing Costa-Gavras' movie Z in The Screen cinema, an arthouse cinema in Dublin. It's a fantastic film. I studied Greek mythology and Greek theatre. I've hitched to Greece. I've come to a small village on a tiny island near the coast of Turkey a great deal of my adult life. I've gone probably to more islands than Odysseus himself on his way back from the Trojan war. I love Z for the spirit of the Greek people, which I've loved from Neolithic times through classical times into the contemporary, and their resistance to Nazis and fascism in the civil war. I found expression of that in Costa-Gavras's movie.
