'A significant and emotional year': Cork venue and gallery managers unpack 2024
Pictured are Eibhlin Gleeson of the Cork Opera House, Mary McCarthy of the Crawford Art Gallery, and Ray Blackwell, DeBarras of Clonakilty.
"It was a very tough year for independent grassroots music venues across the country. The cost of living crisis has been felt: mega-gigs like Coldplay, Taylor Swift and Springsteen are hoovering up all the diminished disposable income of the gig-going populace, making it harder for independent artists and venues at the grassroots level to get people out to shows.
A personal highlight for DeBarras was hosting Louisville’s "Appalachian post-punk solipsist" Bonnie Prince Billy. We had been trying to book him for the last 15 years and the gig and the man lived up to our highest expectations.
As we move into 2025, increasing costs, decreasing disposable income and more competition at the highest level is really quite frightful.
We hope the next minister for culture will continue the great work Catherine Martin managed to achieve during her term in government. The government need to reduce the vat rate for gig tickets for venues under 500 capacity. This would make a massive difference to our industry and bring more benefits to the communities that our independent venues serve.
Accommodation also continues to be a massive problem for touring artists throughout the country. However, you have to be optimistic in business and hope that if you continue to work hard and do your job well, people will come to your venue and gigs."
"It was a significant and emotional year at Crawford Art Gallery as we closed our doors to the public on September 22nd to prepare for our major capital project, Transforming Crawford Art Gallery. This involved moving our collection of Canova casts out of the building for the first time in 140 years, so it definitely hasn’t been a typical year.
The visual arts scene in Cork is increasingly vibrant, with more artists choosing to set up their practices here with vital support from the studio network. It’s been very exciting to see Lavit Gallery open a pop-up in the city centre: it would be truly progressive for more diverse, small creative projects to open in the city centre.
The Guinness Cork Jazz festival was in great shape in 2024, a rich weekend of musical choices. I am also excited to see more late night cultural activity, and The Everyman after Dark in collaboration with Coughlan’s demonstrated what collaboration can yield for audiences.
For 2025, I would like to see venues supported to open late in ways that suit their audiences, as well as more supports for collaborative community activity: The Dragon of Shandon from Cork Community Art Link is an annual triumph."
"Overall we had a good year in 2024. There were big highlights, like our Proms as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. Lat year’s Panto, Jack and the Beanstalk, ran into the end of January and was a great success for us, and there were a number of other brilliant things including our own production of The Magic Flute, and we took our own production of La Bohème to Cahirsiveen, which was an incredible night of Opera House joy in Kerry, which was lovely.
We’re working towards major productions of musical theatre in the future, and really exercising that musical theatre muscle, whether that is through our own productions or pre-existing titles.
We see a trend of people going to the familiar shows a lot, and that has been happening since Covid: people have less money and so they value their nights out in a different way. They tend to want to go to a big-name artist on tour, or someone they’ve been waiting to see for a long time: it’s a special occasion as opposed to something you might do once a month.
It’s a challenging market for us at the moment because there are just so many gigs and events on over the summer so we really have to try and use our marketing machine to try and be heard at the same level as the Marquee and the Musgrave Park programme. It’s challenging, but it’s not insurmountable.
We also welcome the challenge in a way, because when people are going to more live entertainment, regardless of what form it takes, it is a good thing and we will benefit from that."
"This was the first year where we haven’t felt the cloud of Covid hanging over us, and it’s the first full year where every part of the arts centre has been back in operation. It underscores for us just how long the Covid shadow was: up until December of this year we were still administratively dealing with things that impacted the organisation during Covid.
I think we had a great year. The Sample-Studios at Triskel residency programme produced a year of beautiful visual arts for us. It’s the first year that the visual arts programme has been back up and running and is a huge credit to Aoibheann McCarthy and the artists of Sample-Studios. We’re delighted with that partnership.
With the Cork Theatre Collective, it has been lovely to have Pat Kiernan and Corcadorca’s legacy back. With 2024 their first year in operation, as well as visual arts, the theatre side of things was back and that just brought a life and creativity.
It’s the people who work in the arts centre who make it what it is. 35,000 people came through the building in 2024, and it’s all those collective partnerships that made that happen.
Triskel’s board, led by Paula Cogan, are currently engaged in putting together a new strategic plan and that plan is the roadmap towards our 50th anniversary year, which is 2028. It’s intense and brilliant work, and it’s underpinned for 2025 by a 10% increase in our arts council grant, after a long period of being at a standstill."
"Ticket sales were pretty strong in 2024, but smaller venues are really starting to struggle with paying for the gigs.
We’re not taking money from the artists and we don’t take a cut of the door, and so we absorb a lot of the costs like promotion and posters and engineer’s fees.
Before, that used to be covered by people buying drinks at the bar, but we’re finding more and more that people are buying less drink when they are at gigs. That might be positive when it comes to health, but where is that money going to come from?
I don’t think the consumer should be footing that at this stage: I think the government need to go, there’s a value on this, there’s a cultural importance to this. They need to step in and save it.
As the Live Venue Collective we managed to lobby Catherine Martin and secure a tiny bit of funding for next year for grassroots venues, but it’s a drop in the ocean: a half a million euros for all the grassroots venues in the country.
We had a commitment from Catherine Martin, but it will be officially signed off on by the next minister: we have to trust that it will come through, otherwise we will see more small venues close in 2025."
"This year was pretty hard-going, with the economy very hit at the lower end of the scale. The younger audience are living further and further out because they can’t afford the apartments in town, which are taken up by tech workers now, so young people are getting last buses home and aren’t staying out as late.
Costs have gone very high for young people so they are cutting back, and the obvious thing to cut back is leisure and social activity. The government should cut the VAT rate: that would make an enormous difference.
But you just have to keep working and existing and trying to go ahead. We had gigs like The Libertines and Kerbdog appealing to an older crowd in 2024, while the younger crowd are more into the DJs and dance music.
We had just opened our expanded venue when Covid started and then we were closed for two years, so really we’ve been open as a 500 capacity with an extra 150 in Wavelength upstairs for three years. It means we are getting bigger acts that we wouldn’t have been able to get before.
I think Cork is coming on in leaps and bounds: the new city manager seems to be very vibrant and go-ahead, even down to the switching on of the Christmas lights this year bringing a new buzz to the city. You saw it during the Jazz Festival too: there is a great buzz around Cork."
"Going back to City Hall and doing a number of gigs including the Mary Wallopers and Mick Flannery in December was a highlight for 2024, although it was sad that Kneecap had to cancel their gig due to family tragedy, and we are looking forward to having them back in February for two nights.
The other big highlight was our rooftop gig at North Main Street Carpark for Culture Night. I’ve always loved rooftops. We also did a weekend in Garnish Island the same weekend as Culture Night and it was fantastic: we had Cormac Begley, Lisa Hannigan, and writers like Sinéad Gleeson.
I don’t think anything has fully recovered from Covid. I think what’s happened is effectively the idea of a regular club with the same people coming each week seems to be sadly gone. Coughlan’s does a great job, but you’re kind of missing that middle ground of 150-200 capacity venues. I think we need those stepping stone sized venues back.
We really need a 3,000-5,000 capacity venue, but how are you getting tour buses and lorries down the back of Beamish & Crawford? As an events centre, that site just makes no sense.
Are they going to be driving 18-wheelers full of sound gear down Tuckey St or over the South Main Street bridge? It makes zero sense.
"The events centre is going to become a children’s hospital mark two. It’s the area down by the docklands and the Marina that makes sense for a venue of that size."
"For Sirius Arts Centre, 2024 was a year of mixed feelings. We began an exciting, multi-year restoration of our historic building, supported by donors from the Irish Georgian Society in Cobh, Ireland and the US, as well as public funding through the Historic Structures Fund.
Key lost architectural features were returned to the historic building, including a spectacular roof lantern in the central room, and essential underpinning works also took place.
But the rise of operation costs has complicated our capacity to deliver our programme with the ambition we wish. It is now more difficult than ever to support artists and serve our audiences.
With determination and resilience, we still presented 10 new exhibitions and 60 events in 2024. Highlights of our exhibitions include Alice Rekab, who occupied multiples spaces of our premises, including never-used basement areas.
Thaís Muniz, Amna Walayat and Venus Patel explored their identity as migrants and discussed questions of displacement and belonging in Ireland.
In 2025, we will continue the renovation of our premises, with private and governmental financial contributions, and maintain – if not expand – our programme. We will tour exhibitions by Alice Rekab and Marianne Keating throughout the year.
We will renew our commitment to diversify the artists we work with, showcasing practices usually overlooked or disregarded by mainstream venues, and enhance our engagement and outreach, so that more and more people can enjoy the art we present."
