Behind the scenes of Electric Picnic
ELECTRIC Picnic’s laid-back ambiance is one of the Stradbally festival’s defining qualities. Behind the playful, faintly hippy exterior, however, the effort to put on a great show is never ending. With 38,000 attendees and 2,000 performers the event does not organise itself and considerable logistical brawn is required to ensure everything comes together.
The raw numbers make for eye-popping reading. Last year, almost 10,000 man hours were required to ready the site for attendees. Some 5,000 are employed at Stradbally over the weekend — not counting those gracing the stages, spoken word tents and for forth. Thirteen mega-watts of power are consumed across all three days — sufficient to power a small Irish town for an entire year.
