Delicious Déise delights: How Waterford Festival of Food brings fun to Dungarvan
Waterford Festival of Food takes place this year from April 24-26.
It is 7am, Sunday morning, early April in Dungarvan. An azure sky is cloud-free, freshly risen sun already busting a gut to burn off the frosty nip. The large town square at the heart of the West Waterford seaside town is buzzing with market traders, setting up stalls, unpacking wares.
I do the rounds of some of Ireland’s finest food producers: Blaas from Barron’s Bakery; Glenmore Organic Farm free-range eggs; and rare breed free-range pork sausages from Woodside Farm.
Simon Mould has already fired up his Volcano Pizza oven, so sausages, then eggs, go into a cast iron pan and into the furnace. Sausages are cooked in minutes; eggs in seconds, piled onto the pillow-soft blaas.
We toast each other with Golden Bean coffees and breakfast like champions, ready for the day’s trading ahead.
The giant farmers’ market is the grand finale of the Waterford Festival of Food, which has been running since 2008, the Irish food world’s equivalent of the “first swallow” — literally as well as figuratively — the first date on the annual calendar of food festivals around Ireland.
That aforementioned breakfast was back in 2012, my first time at the festival. I’d already put in the hard yards over the weekend before volunteering to help out a friend on her market stall. It was a long day, waves of crowds that never seemed to ebb and, under sweltering heat, I certainly atoned for my sins of the previous two days.
Yet, when it ended, I was disappointed to have to pack up and head home. I left a bit of my heart forever behind in Dungarvan that day, and it is a rare year that I haven’t since returned to what is unquestionably one of Ireland’s finest food festivals, an annual gathering that has minted the soubriquet, Fungarvan.
“The festival started with Waterford County Council running with a national tourism initiative to stimulate spending and growth during the off-season,” says festival CEO Eunice Power, who took over officially as CEO in 2022 and somehow juggles the role along with her other life as restaurant owner, TV chef, cookbook author, and all-round food force.
“That led to a mushrooming of small festivals around the country. Most didn’t stay the course. But in Dungarvan, when we get the bit between our teeth, we don’t let go.”
“We had all this potential in Waterford,” says chef Paul Flynn, of Dungarvan’s renowned Tannery restaurant, “but, when it came to holidays or breaks away, people would always end up going elsewhere, to West Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway and Connemara.
“The whole county embraced it, people loved it, and there was a core group of people who kept it going at every committee meeting.”
The first outing was a much smaller affair than today’s behemoth.
“We decided on a date and theme — a focus on pigs and bacon,” says Eunice, “and were going to have a pig race down Mary St. I had the pigs lined up and we had farmers training pigs, but then someone got on to WLR [FM] complaining about cruelty to animals, so we got people dressed up as pigs instead and it was great craic. We had two food trails through the town and a few cookery demos. Richard Corrigan was the star guest the first year, and he was absolutely controversial.
“He said Cappoquin chickens were shit, and the crowd was horrified. It was almost like the time Ian Paisley was throwing Communion wafers on the ground. The highlight was the farmers’ market on the square, which Darina Allen officially opened, and Wild Side Catering roasted a whole pig on a spit.”
“I was looking at photos the other day,” says Paul, “and there’s me, Richard Corrigan, [the former U2 tour manager] Denis Sheehan, and my toddler daughter in the Lady Belle pub — and now she’s in college.
“Richard was a huge support to us in the early years.”
The festival has grown in size and reputation every year since. In the years that followed, it expanded into its West Waterford hinterland, including Lismore and the Comeragh Mountains and, this year for the first time, will include Waterford City.
“We looked at Taste Waterford [restaurant] members,” says Eunice, “and asked about doing restaurant trails, and got an amazing reaction.
“Then we were approached by GIY to include them. They are having a skills and farming weekend between their urban garden at Grow HQ in Waterford and their market garden farm on Curraghmore Estate in Portlaw. And they’ll be having a Saturday night dinner in Grow HQ.
“Then you’ve got chefs Liam Finnegan and Hillary Casey; and restaurant manager Bobby Bowe, from Ashford Castle; and Eric Matthews from Kicky’s and Bang, doing a dinner in the House of Waterford, a timeless luxury affair with Waterford Crystal on the table.”
What marks the festival out from the rest of the pack is just how invested it is in engaging with the entire community — not just the food lovers.
“I saw a woman on the Today Show [on RTÉ],” says Eunice, “talking about Lámh [a system of manual communication used in Ireland by people living with a developmental disability and neurodivergent children and adults], and we started doing a Lámh cookery demo with everything signed out so kids with special needs or Down [syndrome] could understand all that was happening.”
The festival has also worked with Autism Friendly Dungarvan to make it more accessible to autistic children and adults, including quiet spaces and breaks.
“That helped us to understand what to do to accept them for each event,” says Eunice, “and how to make our festival more accessible to people with autism.
“The nicest email I had in the history of the festival was from a family on the Sunday of the last festival. Parents of a kid with very challenging special needs and three other kids, and this was the first time where they didn’t have to go home in a state of flux as their kid was accommodated and the other three kids really enjoyed themselves.
“There are also events for the older audience, Craicly storytelling and afternoon tea in the nursing home, a showband and afternoon tea in Park Hotel.
“Personally, I’m really into community and, in a time when people don’t communicate with each other, the festival is a super platform to try and change that. We wanted to look a bit beyond the fun for able-bodied people and try to make it more inclusive.”
Another remarkable aspect of the festival is that it is a mammoth operation with a significantly less than mammoth budget.
“We get funding from Waterford County Council, Fáilte Ireland and, this year from the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine,” says Eunice.
“Our three sponsors have been with us from the beginning: Dawn Group, Flahavan’s and Tirlán [formerly Glanbia]. The rest of the funding is through our local community here in Dungarvan.”
The festival programme has come on in leaps and bounds since the early days. In 2024, there were around 75 events; last year, 100; and this year, the figure has risen to 154.
Eunice and festival programme manager Martha Macklin do the heavy lifting with their core team and a team of about 80 volunteers.
“This year, our biggest challenge has been our technology,” says Eunice, “that is always the biggest. We need more support on web and e-commerce. No one goes near it from one end of the year to the next, and then it gets an absolute hammering on one day of the year when tickets go on sale, which brings all sorts of problems, including the web host thinking we’re being attacked and taking down the site.”
The ever-growing popularity also highlights a long-standing problem in general for tourism in Dungarvan — the lack of beds for overnight stays.
“We don’t have enough rooms in Dungarvan, even including self-catering and Airbnb. We are trying to entice people to stay in Waterford, and we are putting on a bus that travels every half hour from the city, along with all the other events on in the city itself.”
Along with a shortage of beds, a huge demand for ticketed events means Eunice and her team are ever on the lookout for more venues.
“We keep trying to come up with new [pop-up restaurant] venues. This year, we have over 700 seats outside traditional restaurants and they were booked
almost immediately.”
While Eunice admits that Paul Flynn is “allergic to the meetings”, there is no doubt the Dungarvan chef has been crucial to the festival’s success down through the years. One of Ireland’s finest chefs — who earned Michelin stars for Nico’s in London in the 80s, before returning home to eventually open The Tannery with his wife Máire — he has put Dungarvan on the food map.
Using his extraordinary contacts book, he has persuaded a host of top Irish and British chefs to turn up each year for the festival to cook what is always the hottest ticket in town: The Saturday night dinner in The Tannery.
“We were thinking bigger picture,” says Paul, “if we could get a chef from the UK, we might get international exposure, and it would show our intent and reach, that we could engage at a serious level.
“Richard Corrigan was great, showed up for the first few years, and helped bring people like [highly respected UK food writer] Matthew Fort, [and renowned UK chefs] Mark Hix, Angela Hartnett, and when you see well-respected chefs coming over, others will follow.”
The roll call of chefs who’ve cooked over the years at the Tannery Saturday dinner include some of the finest chefs in Ireland and Britain over the last 50 years.
“[Chef] Jason Atherton had worked under me at Chez Nico and Fergus Henderson [founding chef of the world-famous London restaurant, St John, and author of the seminal Nose to Tail Eating] was another brilliant night.”
Another compelling aspect of the festival, especially for the participants, is the hugely social side which inevitably runs far into the night.
“Fergus had started on the Dr Fergus,” says Paul, “his own vile concoction of fernet branca and creme de menthe at 11am, and we had finished the dinner — and we’re well into the wee hours in a certain establishment — when nothing would do me but to explain to him the beauty of hurling.
“So, next thing, we got them to put on the video of the 2010 Munster final when Waterford beat Cork by a point, and the whole place went baloobas. That was peak happiness for me and then we had to get up early the next day and do the next gig.
“It’s hard work organising all these things on top of your daily work, but it is always a very social side so you have to be ready for three days’ work, three nights out, and then on the Monday, you’re picking up the pieces.”
This year, the team from Dublin’s Uno Mas will do the Saturday night honours. The traditional Sunday lunch will be cooked by Ashford Castle’s Liam Finnegan, with the team from Cork’s Paradiso doing lunch in The Tannery Cookery School.
“There are lots of different communities within the festival — the community at large which has a huge pride in the festival — but then there’s also the Irish food community which really loves this festival,” says Eunice.
“It’s before the busy summer season kicks off for all of them, so it’s an opportunity for the community to get together — a fun thing. Food professionals make huge connections through this festival.
“I was eating in Paradiso when they approached me and said they’d love to get involved. It gives me great heart that we are seen in the industry as something people of this calibre want to get involved with.”
- Waterford Festival of Food takes place this year from April 24-26. See waterfordfestivaloffood.com
