Native sheep farmer, designers, and Adam Clayton to headline at Fashion & Farming Festival in Kinsale

The Fashion & Farming festival aims to gather the innovators, dreamers, fabricators, planners and inventors to sow the seeds for fresh ideas to help mend the farm-to-fabric cycles, which have been damaged in recent decades

Blátnaid Gallagher, farmer of Galway Sheep, Aughrim, County Galway. Picture: David Ruffles

We're all well aware of cheap clothing that has originated in places many of us have never set foot in. And we're not going to solve the fast fashion and synthetic fibres issues in a day. But when you or a visitor to this country buys a wool sweater or tweed garment that comes with labels proudly declaring them to be 'pure Irish' or 'crafted in Éire' we might expect the yarn to come from the tufty sheep that skittered away from our car as we drove by a few minutes ago. 

But the wool from sheep here has been shipped off this island as a CAT 3 waste product and the wool throws, classy tweed scarves, and luxurious-feeling carpets touted as 'Irish' are actually most likely made from imported yarn.