Festivals
Notions and necessities: From street photography festivals to fashion and unique furniture buys, it's all here
Festivals
'It's about being Irish and celebrating Ireland' - St Patrick's Festival 2025 launched in Dublin
Swimmers brave the cold for Christmas Eve charity in Co Down
Wed 25 Dec 2024 at 05:11
People and dogs take part in the London Christmas jumper corgi parade
Mon 09 Dec 2024 at 03:57
All Together Now reveals line-up for 2025 festival
Thu 21 Nov 2024 at 08:46
Glastonbury tickets sell out in less than 40 minutes
Sun 17 Nov 2024 at 05:56
A Magical Moment: Little Blue Heroes Turn on Dublin's Christmas Lights
Thu 14 Nov 2024 at 20:55
Your ultimate Halloween events guide: ancient vampires, prowling dragons and a giant newt called Alf
Thu 31 Oct 2024 at 06:41
A dollop of 'Deadpool' and a dash of DIY – we're mixing and matching as we dress up for Halloween fun
Tue 29 Oct 2024 at 22:30
11 free Halloween events happening in your Dublin area
Sun 27 Oct 2024 at 02:00
Murder, hauntings and witchcraft – the spookiest pubs in Dublin for a spot of grisly history with your pint this Halloween
Fri 25 Oct 2024 at 21:30
US star Gregory Porter 'thrilled' to be back in Ireland as Cork Jazz Festival kicks off
Thu 24 Oct 2024 at 11:07
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Extra.ie
22 minutes ago
- Extra.ie
Irish singles take centre stage in Love Is Blind UK season 2
Netflix has finally lifted the veil on the cast of Love Is Blind: UK Season 2 – and the pods are about to get a distinctly Irish twang. Among a number of hopeful romantics getting ready to flirt through the walls and gamble on love without a single glance, several hail from across the Irish Sea. From Limerick natives to Wicklow wanderers and even a Northern Irish accent or two in the mix, this year's batch promises plenty of craic alongside the chaos. Christine in Love is Blind: UK: Season 2. Pic: Netflix/Tom Dymond The streaming giant unveiled the line-up on Thursday morning, sparking instant buzz online. Could 2025 finally be the year the UK franchise delivers its first mega Irish love story—or heartbreak broadcast in 4K? A synopsis for the reality show reads: 'UK and Ireland-based singles who want to be loved for who they are have signed up for a less-conventional approach to modern dating, and will choose someone to marry without ever meeting them. 'Over several weeks, the newly engaged couples will move in together, plan their wedding and find out if their physical connection matches their strong emotional bond developed in the Pods. Tara in Love is Blind: UK: Season 2. Pic: Netflix/Tom Dymond 'When their wedding day arrives, will real-world realities and external factors push them apart, or will they marry the person they fell blindly in love with? Hosted by Emma and Matt Willis, this series will uncover whether looks, race or age do matter, or if love really is blind.' First up representing the emerald isle, we have 35-year-old HR Operations Lead Christine, with the Limerick native hopeful to strike gold. 'Christine has had her fair share of heartbreak and admits that bad boys are her downfall. The Monica from Friends lookalike finds it hard to date in her small rural town where the guys are already snapped up,' show bosses divulged. Billy in Love is Blind: UK: Season 2. Pic: Netflix/Tom Dymond 'As an only child, Christine would love to be able to provide her parents with a grandchild and is hoping the experiment will lead to the white wedding she's always dreamed of.' Next up we have Tara, a 33-year-old cafe owner from County Wicklow. Speaking on her dating history, show bosses said: 'Tara finds it tough to meet men in Wicklow because the dating pool is relatively small. Her last relationship ended 18 months ago after more than two years together because she felt they were recycling the same jokes and small talk. Tara was told by a fortune teller that she'd be engaged by September, so watch this space!' Hailing from up north, we have 35-year-old Army Physical Trainer Barry. The Bangor native was once married, but is now ready to find love once more following his split. 'Billy has been single since his divorce five years ago and finds the modern-day dating world 'a complete minefield.' He often feels like the third wheel as most of his friends are settled down and as a result, doesn't socialise as much as he used to. 'Divorce hasn't put Billy off marriage and he's keen to be a husband again and start a family with his life partner.' The second season of Love is Blind UK will hit Netflix on August 13.
Extra.ie
an hour ago
- Extra.ie
Mel Gibson set to return to Meath for Braveheart anniversary
Mel Gibson will return to Co Meath next week to mark the 30th anniversary of the Academy Award-winning movie 'Braveheart'. The Hollywood actor directed, produced and starred in the 1995 film which, despite its Scottish setting, was primarily shot in Ireland. Many of the medieval scenes were shot across the landscapes of Kildare, Meath and Wicklow. Braveheart was primarily set in Ireland. Pic: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images Mel is returning to the town of Trim as part of the King John's Summer Prom Festival, which will take place next weekend. The movie was originally set to be filmed in Scotland but tax incentives, as well as the availability of members of the Defence Forces to act as extras, helped the Hollywood star seal the deal with Irish producer Morgan O'Sullivan and then Minister for the Arts, Michael D Higgins in 1994. 'Braveheart' had an estimated budget of $72 million (€62.9 million) and proved to be a huge success, getting nominated in 10 categories at the 68th Academy Awards and winning five awards including Best Picture. Trim Castle was portrayed as the fortified English town of 'York' while the 'London square' was also created on the other side of the castle wall. Mel portrayed the character of Scottish warrior William Wallace in the First War of Scottish Independence against King Edward I of England. Braveheart won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. Pic: Steve Starr CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images The 69-year-old will be signing posters at Trim Castle Hotel on the morning of Saturday 9 August with all proceeds going towards the Irish Equity Benevolent Fund, providing emergency assistance to people in financial difficulty. He will be joined by many other cast members in Trim to attend a screening of the film on Saturday night, as well as a number of concerts. 'Braveheart' is the theme for this year's King John Summer Prom Festival and organisers are promising a weekend of 'cinematic soundscapes, soaring vocals and symphonic wonder'. The Irish Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Niall O'Sullivan will be among the other acts performing at the festival. It is described as the 'largest orchestral festival on the island of Ireland' with almost 300 performers from home and abroad taking to the stage.
Extra.ie
2 hours ago
- Extra.ie
50 years ago today: Remembering The Miami Showband Massacre
Historically, music had been an arena in which people moved freely, most of the time, beyond the dysfunctional, tired, old sectarian fault-lines. Gary Moore may have come from a so-called Protestant or Loyalist background in East Belfast, but that didn't matter a damn when he arrived in Dublin to join Skid Row, plugged in his Gibson Les Paul and made a glorious noise. Nor was religious affiliation of the slightest concern when Rory Gallagher moved to Belfast and based himself there, when his band Taste was starting to make real waves. Rory never lost that particular, non-sectarian rock 'n' roll faith. Throughout the 1970s – long after the Troubles had erupted, and violence on the part of the British State and paramilitary groups alike, saw people being butchered, maimed and brutalised on an appallingly regular basis – fans of Rory left any allegiances they might have been assumed to feel behind, as they travelled to the Ulster Hall to see the G-man in action. Music could be above all forms of sectarianism. Most of the time it was. It never occurred to me to see Van Morrison and his marvellous lyricism as anything other than Irish. In almost every respect, we felt closer to him; to the Portstewart guitar genius Henry McCullough; and to The Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers, when their time came, than to the country, showband and cabaret crews who still dominated music in much of rural Ireland. Not that everything had been entirely rosy, far from it. In 'Down At The Border', the original Eyeless, a three-piece involving me, my brother Dermot, and Garry O Briain, had written a song about it. 'Down at the border,' it opened, 'We met a gunman on the loose/ Followed down by an English convict/ Just out of the calaboose/ Two rustlers, pig smugglers/ And a tourist or two/ And then there was me… and you.' Later in the song, the gunman shoots the convict 'over something that he said'. There really was a surreal aspect to it all, like a magic mushroom trip gone horribly, murderously wrong. And then, for musicians, it got far worse entirely. Illustration: David Rooney The brutal massacre of members of the Miami Showband, on July 31st, 1975, involved breaking a kind of sacred taboo, which had guaranteed musicians the freedom to travel across the border without fear of being ambushed. It poisoned the atmosphere and put an almost complete stop to local musicians from South of the border travelling North to play. I had a more visceral sense than most of what had happened. Eyeless, now featuring my brother Dermot, Neil Jordan, Pat Courtney and Bryan McCann, in a five-piece line-up, had travelled North in May that year, to support John Martyn in Queen's University, Belfast. My partner Mairin, pregnant with our first child at the time, was in the van too when we set out for home. A wrong turn took us into the vicinity of Keshfield at 1 am, and we experienced a scarifying brush with what can only have been loyalist paramilitaries. We were lucky to get to the benighted town of Portadown, where we stopped in the most open, visible location we could find, scrambling to find our bearings and chart a path back across to Newry. We made it, but it might have been a prelude to what happened to the Miami, who had been one of the most popular bands on the showband scene for the previous decade and more, a couple of months later. The van in which they were travelling was stopped on the way back to Dublin from a gig in Banbridge, close to the route we had travelled. Posing as British Army personnel, members of the illegal UVF, some of whom were also in the legal but irredeemably corrupt Ulster Defence Regiment, instructed the musicians to stand in line at the side of the road. The plan had been to carry out a fake inspection, covertly plant a bomb and send the musicians on their way. Some accounts say that the bomb would have detonated in Newry. Others think the plotters wanted the van to cross the border before it exploded. Fate – and the incompetence of the UVF – triggered events in an entirely different direction that night. While it was being installed under the driver's seat, the bomb went off, instantly killing two of the UVF members, Harris Boyle (22) and Wesley Somerville (34), whose bodies were blown to kingdom come, landing in blackened stumps across a wide area. Somerville's arm was found some 100 yards away from the scene, pathetically emblazoned with a tattoo that said 'UVF Portadown'. The members of the Miami were also blown away into the adjacent field, but they were still alive, one and all. The UVF thugs panicked, gave chase and shot dead three members of the Miami – lead singer Fran O'Toole, trumpeter Brian McCoy, and guitarist Tony Geraghty. They thought the others were dead too. The Miami – like most Irish professional bands at the time – were naturally and unselfconsciously anti-sectarian. There were two nominally Protestant musicians in the band, Ray Millar and Brian McCoy, both of whom were from Northern Ireland. Brian McCoy, in particular, was like a beacon of how music could potentially reach across every divide. From the small village and townland of Caledon in the south-east of County Tyrone, he was the son of the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge in the county. You couldn't get more traditionally Norn Iron Protestant. Brian had close relatives in the RUC. His brother-in-law had been a member of the discredited and ultimately disbanded B-Specials, an organisation of supremacist Protestant army reservists. In a different universe, he might have been on the other side of the encounter that night. Except that his devotion to music had liberated him… However you looked at it, Brian McCoy seemed like an unlikely target. And yet he was the first to die, hit in the back and neck by nine rounds from a Luger automatic pistol as he tried to make his escape. That was the mid-1970s. Two serving UDR 'soldiers', Thomas Crozier and James Roderick Shane McDowell, were found guilty of the murders and received life sentences. A third man, John James Somerville, a former UDA 'soldier', was later also found guilty of the murders. However, none of the three gave details of who else was involved or who had planned the attack. It has long been believed that there were elements of collusion involving the RUC and the British Army. A series of tit-for-tat killings was carried out by the IRA in response, possibly even including the murder of Eric Smyth, a brother-in-law of Brian McCoy, in 1994. That was the kind of country we had been living in: a nightmare, a twilight zone, in which no level of brutality was deemed impermissible and families could have their own gunned down ruthlessly by either side or both. The eruption of punk had lifted everyone, at least partially, out of the slough of despond into which the Miami massacre – a gruesome act of sickening butchery – had plunged us. As The Sex Pistols stormed the top of the UK charts in 1977, and The Clash became overtly political, all forms of authority were being questioned. For Belfast band Stiff Little Fingers, the Troubles became part of the subject matter – the band making it clear that they had no time whatsoever for the bores (their word) that were in charge. It is no harm to remember the incendiary force of what the song, 'Alternative Ulster', released as a single in October 1978, had to say. 'You got the Army on your street,' lead singer Jake Burns sang, 'And the RUC dog of repression/ Is barking at your feet/ Is this the kind of place you wanna live?/ Is this where you wanna be?/ Is this the only life we're gonna have?/ What we need is/ An alternative Ulster/ Alternative Ulster…'
