Midsummer fun in Skerries

THE seaside town of Skerries is the place to be this weekend as its sixth annual Midsummer Festival gets underway.

Running from Friday, June 21 to Sunday 23, the festival is part of Fáilte Ireland’s ‘Dublin, Surprising By Nature’, in association with Fingal Tourism.

Skerries Midsummer Festival celebrates almost two millennia of strong historic and cultural associations with the surrounding seas. The area is steeped in history and legend: St Patrick himself first landed and lived on one of Skerries’ five islands all the way back in 432AD.

Festival highlights include the Three Island Challenge, Ireland’s first east coast Currach Race, featuring the Skerries built Currach na Sceiri. Participating currachs must transport a full keg of Guinness around the three islands and back to shore! 

There will be paddleboard and kayak tasters with water-sport school Outdoor Dublin, swimming races, sailing displays, on-the-beach sports, sand castle competitions and outdoor cinema movies. Live music will be provided by foot-stomping bluegrass festival favourites, Prison Love.

The whole thing kicks off with a swanky Black Tie Ball in Skerries Sailing Club.

Throughout the weekend, there will be a beach-side tented festival village of vendors, craftspeople and family amusements. The Irish Foodie Town finalist’s 10 pubs and 20 restaurants will serve up heaping helpings of hospitality – as well as the obligatory ice cream and chips by the sea.

Skerries is a Tidy Towns national winner, voted second only to Westport as the Irish Times Best Place in Ireland to Live and recipient of RTE/Rehab’s Community of the Year Award.

Skerries has 6km of award-winning beaches nestled each side of Red Island, where the Feargal Quinn family’s famous holiday camp once rocked into the wee hours to Thin Lizzy, Horslips, Rory Gallagher and a young U2. The holiday camp is no more but Red Island, now a beautiful park, is accessible by a single scenic road with sea to each side, studded with award-winning restaurants and bars, overlooking a 500-year-old harbour full of trawlers, bobbing sailboats and seals. 

The town is famously associated with St Patrick who, legend has it, left his furious footprint in the living rock at Red Island after the townsfolk gobbled up his goat – a footprint that can still be seen today. 

Skerries is served by commuter rail services on the Drogheda/Dundalk line and by the 33 bus.

For more information, go to www.VisitSkerries.ie