Galway Arts Festival has grown up and moved out!

In the past, your scribbler has been guilty of clinging to a vision of what the Galway Arts Festival used to be, rather than coming to terms with the inevitability of change.

When the Snapper became a Chelsea fan, she displayed such partisan zeal it frightened me a little.

“Ah, but I’m a convert!” she explained. “You’ve been a Chelsea fan all your life. Converts are always a bit more crazy than those born into it.”

This blow-in became a convert to Galway back in 1992. Unlike the locals who see Galway City and County as the ever-changing backdrop to their lives, I realise now that I took an emotional snapshot of the place I first arrived in, burning into my brainbox an image of this place at that time.

It was gone forever before I exhaled, yet foolishly still I yearned to replicate how I felt in the anarchic atmosphere of the Saw Doctors in the Big Top, or how I wondered at the sight of a giant Noah shooting water from his fingertips at the parade spectators.

This year the festival offers The Waterboys in the Big Top and hopefully Macnas will parade in the Autumn, so all is good with the world, yet it is those early formative moments that give birth to one’s own nostalgia.

So for several years this colyoom struggled against the Galway Arts Festival changing, moaning about the price of seats, groaning about how few local artists were being included, bewailing the lack of street theatre and bellyaching about the loss of connection the city had with its major festival.

Misguided as it may have been, mine was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Indeed, I wonder if we would have our excellent current Fringe Festival (galwayfringe.ie) had not Project 06 made such a powerful case for the people on the streets.

Despite all my rants, I am and have always been a huge fan of the Galway International Arts Festival, (née: Galway Arts Festival). Along with countless other international blow-ins, one of the reasons I fell in love with this place was the respect it afforded to the creativity that thrives here.

There are those who joke that Galway City is the graveyard of ambition. To them I say “Poppycock!” partly because it’s an apt word, but also because it feels good.

Hell, I’m going to write it again: Poppycock! Compared to my native city of London, where genius can live and lose a life invisible, Galway embraces artistic endeavour with open arms.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.