New Year gets off to good start with mental health festival

AN annual mental health arts festival, taking place across Dublin and numerous venues nationwide, is currently underway.  

Founded in 2009, First Fortnight 2017 features live music, film, theatre, discussion and arts events that are staged to create open discussion and understanding of mental health problems, and challenge prejudice and discrimination.

First Fortnight is an arts-based mental health charity that organises a festival in the first two weeks of the year aimed at challenging stigma and discrimination. 

“An awareness campaign in the first fortnight of the year works because we are all a little raw at that time of year and more likely to be open to an empathic response,” the event organisers said. 

Co-founder David Keegan explained how the idea of First Fortnight came about.

“In 2009, mental health wasn’t on any agenda, it wasn’t really a conversation we were having,” said Keegan.

“Yet, we were among the worst suicide rates in Europe. That’s how it started.

“I lived with a friend of mine, JP Swaine. His background was as a social worker, while my background was in arts management.

“We combined our efforts and our skillset to do this one event in St Andrew’s Lane, which was tremendously successful, with about 550 people turning up.” 

The following year, Keegan and Swaine were approached by Amnesty Ireland and Mental Health Ireland to host a similar music event, along with a mental health talk. 

“Because of the success of the first one, we felt we needed a bigger capacity for the second one, so we moved to a venue that held 750 people,” Keegan added.

“We tested the model with those two first years and then decided the following year to hold our first festival.”

One of the highlights of the festival includes an event that encapsulates everything First Fortnight stands for.

The Therapy Sessions return this year with an eclectic line-up of some of Ireland’s brightest talent in music, writing, poetry and spoken word performance.

The second of the two Therapy Sessions will be curated by the brilliant Girl Band and the line-up on January 13 will feature six-piece Dublin funk band Tongue Bundle, who electrified crowds earlier this year at Knockanstockan and the Dublin ‘Jazz Is …’ Festival.

The wonderful songwriter Paddy Hanna will also grace the stage, along with Ben Waddell and Dunny. The spoken word line-up curated by wordsmith Stephen James Smith will include Deanna Rodger and Gerry Potter while local home grown talent includes Alicia Byrne Keane, Niall Donnelly, Cormac Lally and Sorcha Fox.

Meanwhile,  a ‘Sing Along Social’ on Sunday, January 15 at 7.30pm which takes place at MVP on Upper Clanbrassil Street, is a “zero commitment choir” hosted by singing enthusiast Aoife McElwain.

You don’t need to be able to sing  or need to know the words as lyric books are supplied.

Find out about the Sing Along Social at facebook.com/singalongsocial or on Twitter and Instagram @singalongsocial.

Tickets and a full line up of events are available at www.firstfortnight.ie.

REPORT: Hayley Halpin