Disappointment as plug pulled on Macnas Parade

Date Published: 18-Apr-2013

BY JUDY MURPHY

The Macnas Parade, a free highlight of the annual Galway Arts Festival, will not take place this July, after the two groups involved failed to agree on funding for the event.

The parade, which is held on the middle Sunday of the Festival, regularly attracts crowds of up to 60,000 people into the city, including many families.

Already this year, the company has toured to festivals in China, Russia and Australia and has also been involved in the St Patrick’s Day parades in Cork and Limerick. But for the first time in recent years, Galway will not have the company taking to the streets for the Arts Festival.

It costs more than €100,000 to stage the Arts Festival parade. In recent years Macnas had shouldered the most of the cost of financing this, according to the company’s Artistic Director Noeline Kavanagh. Macnas provided 70% of the finance, with the Festival’s contribution coming in at 10% and Galway City Council covering the remaining 20%.

Macnas, which received €245,000 from the Arts Council last year, had warned the Arts Festival that it could not continue its level of contribution, as doing so threatened the existence of the company.

“We’ve put in nearly all of our money in the last few years to make the Arts Festival parades happen. I didn’t want to put out a lesser story onto the street this Summer and with the resources available to the Galway Arts Festival, it would have been lesser,” says Ms Kavanagh.

Macnas is funded under the Street Arts and Spectacle section of the Arts Council, one of only two groups in the country to get support, and as such, it has a national remit, explains Ms Kavanagh. “We couldn’t justify spending so much of our funding on one event in Galway.”

And while Galway fans of Macnas will not enjoy a parade this Summer, Ms Kavanagh hopes that the group will be able to stage a major event in the city later in 2013. “Macnas is seeking other stakeholders to make a parade happen later in the year. I want to maintain the tradition of the parade in Galway – this energy snaking through the streets with cornucopia of every class and every age watching it.”

The Festival has also expressed its disappointment that the parade will not be taking place, with its Artistic Director Paul Fahy saying that the decision was a purely financial one.

While accepting that the public would be disappointed at the lack of a Macnas parade this year, he says there will be other free outdoor events during the Festival.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.