Concern for future of popular music festiva

CONCERNS have been expressed for the future of the popular Beatyard music festival which took place over the weekend in Dún Laoghaire.

According to local TD, Richard Boyd Barrett, the music festival that has taken place at the town’s Harbour for the last five years, may not get the go ahead for next year because of council plans for a pop-up Shakespeare Theatre.

The People Before Profit TD said he was fully supportive of plans for the Shakespeare Rose Pop-Up Theatre coming to the Harbour but added that he cannot understand why this would threaten the future of the Beatyard festival.

“Beatyard is tremendously successful and has been enormously beneficial to the town over the last number of years,” he said.

“It seems utterly crazy that the fantastically successful Beatyard festival would be edged out of the Harbour by the Rose Theatre. Why on earth can these two events not run consecutively?

“A pop-up Shakespeare Theatre would be a brilliant addition to the summer events in the Harbour and to really get the most out of it, it should start in May in order to tie in with Leaving and Junior cert students who very only really experience Shakespeare in the classroom.

“Starting the theatre earlier would then allow Beatyard to take the August Bank Holiday slot it has had for the last five years.”

A spokesperson for Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council said that every year there is a wide variety of high quality cultural, sporting and musical events co-funded or licenced by the council.

“The council is currently in negotiations with a third party to bring a high-profile event to Dún Laoghaire that will take place between May and August 2020,” the spokesperson said.

“It is expected that these negotiations will be completed by the end of August. It would not be feasible to run both the Beatyard and the proposed event side by side because of its scale.

“The council will not be making any further comment until negotiations are complete.”

In a statement on their Facebook page the organisers told patrons they had some “bad/good news from us regarding Dun Laoghaire Harbour, where we’ve just started at the site build for Beatyard this weekend!

“Bad news – It’s looking very likely this will be our last time here, that we will be unable to use the Harbour site for the festival next year 2020 & we will need to look elsewhere,” they wrote. “We aren’t getting clear answers on ‘next year’ and getting the site and dates confirmed – so we are putting the call out now if you have or know anyone in the area [or beyond] who would be interested in hosting this Beatyard 2020 – get in touch! Ideally, we want to keep this festival in Dublin City.”

They post adds: “This year is our 5th time doing it in Dun Laoghaire, and its [hopefully] fair to say it brought something positive to the area. Our pals at Bingo Loco and MCD have run events here this year, and there is/was a real sense that things were going in a positive direction after it taking us 3-4 years to find our feet.

“But at the same time, we can’t operate here every year on uncertainty, or the idea that other events from abroad will get brought in and we get edged out – not after investing that amount of time and energy into it, and most of us are local to this area too. That just doesn’t seem fair, so we need to consider & create some options. So we’re putting an SOS call out for rescue…”