Here comes the summer... 10 of the best music festivals in Ireland
Love is a Stranger
Juniper Barn, Ballymote, Co Sligo May 17
Headliners: Crazy P (DJ), Susan O'Neill, God Knows
From the team behind Another Love Story, Love is a Stranger is an even more boutique option. The second edition of the festival comprises a small melange of genres, bands, and DJs from around Ireland to help kickstart festival season. There are woodland glades and the Juniper Lake, complete with sauna and swimming deck. As they say themselves, it's a showcase of all of the beauty and richness of the Sligo countryside as summer on the West coast blooms - and there's also a kids corner. But don't let all that overshadow the music. The world famous Crazy P continue their mission to spread the message of disco unity via their DJ sets while Dean Bryce makes his debut Irish bow.
Tickets: €95.50 (overnight camping); €65.50 (day attendee) €125 (family - two adults, two children)
Forbidden Fruit
IMMA, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin City May 31-June 1
Underworld, Jamie xx, Peggy Gou, Caribou
Forbidden Fruit has been running for over a decade and has solidified itself into a stellar dance-oriented event. Peggy Gou gave Kylie Minogue a run for her money at Electric Picnic last year and should draw a huge crowd, while Dan Snaith's Caribou play their first irish show since the release of their 2024 record Honey. Underworld released their latest album Chaos Saucer at the start of March, showing they've still got it in their fifth decade together. As well as the big names, Forbidden Fruit also boasts one of the buzziest acts around in New York's Fcukers, last seen supporting Confidence Man at the Olympia - uber cool.
Tickets: Weekend tickets €174, day tickets €79.50
In the Meadows
IMMA, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin June 7
Gilla Band
Iggy Pop, Slowdive, the Scratch, Gilla Band
Last seen here at All Together Now 2023 struggling a little to throw himself around the stage as much as he did in the 70s - though putting on one of the loudest festival sets we've ever heard - Iggy Pop returns to headline the second outing of In the Meadows. Affectionately known as Lankum-fest last year, it featured a superb lineup curated by the trad powerhouse. In the Meadows has broadened in scope this year, with a healthy mix of Irish acts spread across the lineup. Coming a week after Forbidden Fruit, it can feel a little like the calm after the storm, but once 'I Wanna be Your Dog' hits, all bets are off.
Tickets: €75
Beyond the Pale
Glendalough Estate, Co Wicklow June 13-15
Jon Hopkins, TV on the Radio, Ezra Collective, Broken Social Scene
Any music fans who came of age amid the blogosphere in the mid 2000s will have Beyond the Pale circled on their calendar this year after the announcement of TV on the Radio and Broken Social Scene, indie darlings who have eluded these shores for too long - this will be their first show in Europe since 2018 . Expect tears when the latter drop 'Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl'. A week earlier than their usual summer solstice listing, Beyond the Pale has cemented itself as a mid-sized, music-focused offering and while there are few accoutrements, the variety on stage will more than suffice.
Tickets: Three-day camping €238.95, Sunday day tickets €99
Night & Day
Lough Key Forest Park, Boyle, Co. Roscommon June 27-29
Jose Gonzalez, KT Tunstall, The Stunning, The Wailers
An over-20s event that also caters to families, Night & Day returns for its fourth edition at the end of June. Thanks to its location at beautiful Lough Key Forest Park, as well as the music there are activities including zip-lining courses, forest trails, boat tours, and a tree-top walk. Jose Gonzalez is making his only Irish appearance of the year at the festival and it's also nice to see Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall on the bill. Sultans of Ping, Fionn Regan, and Lisa Hannigan also feature, while newer Irish acts like Skinner (post-punk) and Dug (folk) offer a glimpse of the future.
Tickets: €55 (Friday), €88 (Saturday and Sunday), €185 weekend camping
Longitude
Marlay Park, Dublin July 5-6
David Guetta, 50 Cent, Belters Only, Sonny Fodera, AJ Tracey
AJ Tracey.
It's over 10 years since David Guetta last played in Ireland (Oxegen 2013), so what a coup for Longitude to get him to headline - 2013 was also the year when Longitude started up, with a very different outlook; headliners then included Vampire Weekend and Kraftwerk). Now Longitude is like Oxegen lite, a heady mix of the hottest rap and dance acts around. Belters Only have gotten used to the biggest stages, regularly selling out the 3Arena, while AJ Tracey is one of the most exciting names in rap right now. There's no overnight camping, though, which people travelling from outside of Dublin might note.
Forest Fest
Emo Village, Co Laois July 25-27
Franz Ferdinand, Manic Street Preachers, Travis
The brainchild of solicitor Philip Meagher, in his fifties, a father of two from Portlaoise, he created the festival after finding he couldn't relate to existing events. 'I genuinely wanted to create a local alternative to Electric Picnic and do it at a more intimate, indie level with the highest quality bands and a really good experience for an older audience,' he has said in the past. It's grown over the years - 2025 is the fourth edition of Forest Fest, boasting a capacity of 12,000 - into a fully fledged alternative that skews to the wisened, grizzled festival veteran. Orbital are rubbing shoulders with Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg; the Forest Fleadh stage features Mary Coughlan and Sharon Shannon, among more; and there's an 'Ibiza Rewind' stage too.
Tickets: Day tickets €85, weekend tickets €240.
All Together Now
Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford July 31-August 3
All Together Now. Photo: Joe Evans
Fontaines DC, Nelly Furtado, Bicep (Chroma AV DJ set), London Grammar
The sixth edition of ATN has sold out well in advance - no surprise considering it boasts an incredible lineup headlined by Choice Music Prize winners Fontaines DC. Wet Leg and Michael Kiwanuka are stellar bookings likely drawing disparate crowds, while CMAT is rightly near the top of the bill. Currently on tour supporting Sam Fender around Europe, expect cowboy hats in various shapes and colours to dominate the beautiful estate site. Featuring beautiful bespoke stages and areas - including the stunning 360-degree-sound experience of the Immerse by AVA stage - there's so much to discover at All Together Now.
Tickets: Sold out, no day tickets
Another Love Story
Killyon Manor, Co Meath August 23-24
John Talabot, Fionn Regan, Anna B Savage
Heading into its 11th year, Another Love Story is slimming down to a 1.5-day offering in 2025 - proceedings usually finish up around 6pm on the Sunday, offering punters time to get home to their own bed and set for work on Monday morning. Despite being hit by god-awful weather in the past couple years, the boutique festival (fewer than 2,000 attendees) always has the best vibe, along with lots of kids running around and dogs helping appease weary heads. The music is a brilliantly curated mix of DJs from home and abroad and bands mostly from the folk and indie world. The Treehouse, hidden away in the forest, is probably the best-looking festival stage in Ireland.
Tickets: €115 (Saturday), €65.50 (Sunday), overnight tickets sold out
Electric Picnic
Stradbally, Co Laois August 29-31
Kings of Leon.
Hozier, Chappell Roan, Sam Fender, Fatboy Slim, Kings of Leon
The big one caps off the festival summer. Twenty-one years on from its boutique debut, Electric Picnic sells out as soon as tickets go on sale, with the lineup still under wraps five months out. It's such a huge site, with tonnes of areas to explore, from the Salty Dog to the Trailer Park, with pop-up quizzes and installations to entertain you on your journey. Electric Picnic in 2025 is whatever you want it to be. As for rumours, Sam Fender, Chappell Roan, and Hozier are some of the big names linked with an appearance, while Post Malone has August 31 free after a gig in Munich the previous night. The Wolfe Tones, who got one of the biggest crowds in the festival's history on Sunday afternoon last night, could finally bid their final farewell with a headline slot.
Tickets: Sold out
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Before it became a commercial behemoth - one watched live by more than 30 million people (five times the population of Ireland) at some 15,000 performances in 49 countries, selling over 10 million DVDs worldwide) - there was this. Just this. A seven minute slot. A transfixed house erupting in spontaneous, orgasmic acclaim. An 'is this really happening?' sense of disbelief and awe. And, as the camera pans to a breathless Flatley, giggling as he accepts the rapture of the audience, the vertigo of new possibilities opening dizzyingly before him, an impossibly youthful Gerry Ryan asking his audience a rhetorical question. "What about that, stunning music, amazing dancing, was that or was it not the most spectacular performance you have ever seen?" Few who had watched Flatley's feet move as if fired from the mouth of a howitzer were inclined to raise a dissenting voice. 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Then Bill Whelan's score exploded into life and it was like every living creature in that bustling tavern had been hypnotised. There was never a moment over the next 500 or so seconds when our attention was allowed veer from the TV screen. It was that good, that instantly stimulating, dance as mainlined narcotic, a mood-altering Celtic opiate. Sense of place played a significant role in the elemental ache of joy. It was one of the few times since Italia 90 four years earlier that I had felt that sudden surge - call it patriotism, call it a sense of belonging, call it pride in our heritage - that fills a room to the brim with something I can only describe as heartsoar. We embraced and emoted as we had at the end of the game a few hours earlier. I think there might even have been an eruption of the dreaded Oles. It was a slightly self-conscious way of trying to mask the fact that we were all on the verge of sobbing. It really was that powerful. There we were, a group whose preferred music ranged from The Jam to Bowie to Ska to The Stones, incontinent with emotion because of something we might have scoffed at ten minutes earlier. We were in our native city, yet for some reason the lyric that best describes how I felt in that moment comes from U2's A Sort of Homecoming. "For tonight, at last/I am coming home/I am coming home." So many of those Eurovision interval slots tend to be twee and insecure, but here was an exhibition of rip-roaring Irish self-confidence. A visual, aural, comfortable-in-its-skin feast of excellence. A year later, Riverdance went on the road, and it is that 30th anniversary landmark that was celebrated this week at The Gaiety and at various afterparties that ran long into the night. A confession: I have never been to the full show and never felt an urgent need. In some perverse way, I find the vast global ATM - churning out dollars and yen and all the currencies of the world - into which it has transformed, slightly off-putting. But, we'll always have O'Dwyer's. The emotions awakened by that seismic seven minute rumble in 1994 were sufficiently pure to last a hundred lifetimes. Its innocence; the bone-shaking delight of Flatley hot-footing across the floor with manic, charismatic glee; Butler's effortless elegance and natural-born class; the blur of feet; the way the music hit you beneath the rib cage; the astonishment as we observed the birth of something magical and, the way it made us all all remains gloriously evocative. Ireland would win the Eurovision that night - back then, as invincible as a team co-managed by Jim Gavin and John Kiely, we almost always won - courtesy of Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington performing Rock 'n' Roll Kids. Harrington watched the interval act from backstage and still recalls how the arena convulsed. "That night," he says, "felt like the beginning of the roar of the Celtic Tiger and I was right at the epicentre." Riverdance became a synonym for excellence, for a slightly mythical Irish form of self-expression, a way of articulating a cultural moment that triggered a wash of reverence. Liam Griffin, the messianic and erudite Wexford manager who led the county to a first All-Ireland title for 28 years in 1996, lovingly depicted hurling as the "Riverdance of sport." His poetic description was both arresting and apt. Here were two uniquely Irish forms of cultural expression, both dances, one using feet, the other a sliotar and a wand of ash, each seeming to eloquently express a powerful sense of Irishness. In their liquid movement, their natural flow, Cian Lynch or Patrick Horgan or TJ Reid might well be riverdancing. A great hurling match is both a spectacle and a feeling. It finds your gut. It lifts you to a place of brighter light, this tumultuous choir of stick and ball and galloping athletes. At its best, it dresses itself in a cloak of myth. As Flatley and Butler did all those years ago. On Anna Livia's banks, they danced their dance and the ancient river was not alone in nodding its damp, splashing head in approval, in understanding it had witnessed the shifting of Irish art to the highest ground.
