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September 12th-18th, 2026: The best music, art, theatre and more coming your way this week
Event guide: Culture Night, Matilda the Musical and the other best things to see in Ireland in the week aheadCulture Night 2026: the evening of Friday, September 19th features hundreds of free events around the island of Ireland.
Photograph: Bryan O’Brien, based on “the belief that this rich and varied culture is alive, treasured and nurtured in people’s lives, today and every day”. We can give only a flavour of what’s on, from Musical & Culinary Flavours of Oranmore and Inner Landscape Photography to Cathy’s Call and a Director’s Tour of the National Library of Ireland .
Culture Night Late events include multidisciplinary arts ; a Nialler9 DJ set ; heritage ; techno and comedy .
“No corporate messaging, no quagmires, no pestilential Portaloos … Just life-enhancing music, made by humans, for humans, to enjoy with other humans. ” That’s the message from this community-engineered, not-for-profit festival, which for more than 20 years has presented some of the most interesting names in Irish and international folk-adjacent music.
This year’s highlights include Paul Brady , The Wran and Dug . The festival’s impressive Session Trail offers more left-of-centre music, featuring acts such as Cliffords, Shimmer Boy, Hand of Doom, Ainm and Serengeti Longwalk.
Ben Gibbard, the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, has said he’s not entirely happy about having borrowed his group’s name from the title of a song on Gorilla, the first album by the English art-school pranksters Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, from 1967. He should worry.
From Death Cab for Cutie’s own debut album, Something About Airplanes , from 1998, to this year’s I Built You a Tower, Gibbard and his bandmates have captured the market in melancholy, literate indie pop-rock. More than 40 years after they formed, Hothouse Flowers remain a fixture on the Irish music scene through persistent gigging and the quality of songs such as their debut single, Love Don’t Work This Way, the perennial favourite Don’t Go, Give It Up, and Christchurch Bells.
The latter two songs are on Home, the band’s 1988 album, which is the latest focus of the NCH Landmark series. They band will perform the album in its entirety, so expect, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “gospel-influenced rave-ups”.
‘All I could think about was getting cocaine’: Mothers share their stories of addictionclifdenartsfestival.ie This multidisciplinary arts festival features a townwide arts trail, with more than 50 artists, Irish and international, showcasing their work in the windows of local businesses. An intriguing addition is a daily Festival Bus Tour, which allows visitors to view art collections at nearby Ballynahinch Castle, Renvyle House Hotel, Roundstone Ceramics and the artist residency and studios at Interface, in the Inagh Valley.
Music highlights include The Stunning and Colm Mac Con Iomaire , Niall Breslin will perform tracks from The Place That Has Never Been Wounded, his instrumental album from 2025. The former journalist Robert Harris left his nonfiction days behind him in 1992 with the publication of his bestselling debut novel, Fatherland. Since then he has written a succession of historically based novels that focus on topics ranging from ancient Rome and espionage to technology and religion.
Harris is in Ireland to promote his book Agrippa, which follows the friendship between the titular Roman statesman and Emperor Augustus. Harris will be interviewed by Alex Clarke in Dún Laoghaire and by Ryan Tubridy in Galway. Ticket prices include a signed copy of Agrippa. This three-day gathering is founded, say the organisers, Bog Bodies Press, “on the belief that a story is a starting point, not a consumable end product”.
To this end the festival features conversations with writers and artists, storytelling sessions, live performance, open-mic events and traditional music. Writers/performers include Órla McGovern, Aindrias De Staic, and Seán Óg Ó Murchú.
Continuity Top Gear: Three men cosplay as an early 2000s trio who recall rationing, old money and petrol’s purposeEvent guide: Culture Night, Matilda the Musical and the other best things to see in Ireland in the week aheadMOST READFour HSE regions to lose power over day-to-day spendingBrent steady near $101 as Iran says it is prepared for intense war
Death-Cab-For-Cutie Hothouse-Flowers Roald-Dahl Tim-Minchin Oprah-Winfrey Robert-Harris
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