Kilkenny Arts Festival programme offers the perfect blend

The discerning readers of Condé Nast Traveller magazine voted Kilkenny one of its top 10 of world’s friendliest cities recently, and if you visit during its festival period, you might even consider a mere top 10 is a bit unfair to the place.

Kilkenny during its arts festival is a perfect mix of conviviality and culture, its size allowing the event to dominate the city, without sacrificing artistic integrity.

Celebrating 40 years this year, the festival has always managed to maintain a high profile, even as the summer calendar has, over those four decades, become ever more packed with festivals of one kind or another. Innovations like that of 2005, when the various stands of the festival — musical, literary, theatrical and so on — were curated by experts in each field, have helped it keep an edge in programming terms.