at the heart of it: a brief look back at croílár 2026
People tend to look at me like I have two heads if I mention I haven't been to Other Voices. It's treated as a pilgrimage by industry heads, musicians, and the Irish Music Sickos that I keep company with. And me not going isn't some sort of contrarian principled stance or anything, Dingle is just really far away, accommodation is really hard to come by, and I don't drive. If only there was something a bit more... central...
In April I hopped on the train down to Croílár in Athlone. It's been a highlight of the year so far. It was funny to see anyone I knew going to it referring to it as "basically Other Voices 2", but in defence of everyone making the comparisons - I mean, you see it, right? In a church with trees on the altar and beautiful atmospheric lighting, there's a part of your brain that's thinking "yeah I assume this is what it's like down in Dingle". Stepping out into the daylight and the Rise Up Soundsystem is washing everyone in bass with the occasional "Athlone to the bone" sample mixed in. Deep into the night, watching some of the best live acts in Ireland tearing up a random small-town nightclub stage with some brilliant stage design and production going on, asking "could every town in the country do this?"
There's some kind of magic there, and I can't quite place how they did it. It begins, of course, with the lineup.
I seriously can't get over just how much space across various niches the festival pulls off, touching every corner of the Fourth Best agenda; from the aforementioned DIY soundsystem to some phenomenal emerging songwriters, and a few undeniable heavy hitters up top.
Like, you could trace my path through the first day I got there. Open with Stella and the Dreaming framed perfectly in the church, stick around to see Olan Monk coat the entire church in thick fog (sonically and visually), cross the road to see Softdrink Millionaire hit the most beautiful breakdown imaginable in a song about sending AI Homer Simpson memes, head downstairs to the basement afterwards to catch the second beat in chenaldinho tull o mór in the Skagaboo set. Stick around in that same basement and you'll get to hear a,w/l. murder a Kanye song, Morgana coming around with disco anguish, Tender in deep b2b. All of that was one day! I have it all on camera!
Could every town in the country do this? Well, look. Despite how much I loved every second of those runs (although I would have much preferred to see Olan Monk's full band again, which gave me a late-breaking candidate for the best gig of 2025 last time I saw them), there's something I'm keeping from you. I can't make sense of the crowd at the festival at all. Like, until the room absolutely packed out for Morgana, I honestly could have sworn nobody was at this festival. For some of the acts like Ahmed, With Love. I feel like it'd be generous to say that twenty people were there. A rumour was flying around that like at least third of the tickets moved for the festival were guest-list. (Disclosure: I was also on a media pass)
But then, on day two, I was in a room that was so packed that it completely destroyed the vibe. Towards the end of the night, with just one venue open, anyone who had a ticket swarmed into Maisie's to see Spooklet and Huartan. During Huartan's set, the amount of people talking to each other at just completely unconscionable volume made paying attention any music completely impossible. I went to bed. I will go see Huartan some other time though, they looked class.
Look, the problem of yapping at gigs goes long before Croílár. And the density of that crowd in Maisie's isn't even a slight at the festival; to do this much with limited space, in full awareness and defiance that this just isn't normal for the town, it's an achievement.
Yet I didn't really even have time to see more music before getting on a train on day three, so it just put a fucking dampener on the whole thing. And it's a shame because day two started out equally brilliant. Battered by the wind, sure, but a few cans at the Canopy fixes that ill; Rita Lynn & Arthur Greene used the church space to its fullest by actually centring the organ in their performance, and Joshua Burnside made a case for him being one of our finest songwriters in a touching, intimate performance, as his songs covered holding on despite the weight of grief.
So look. It isn't easy. And what it gets right it gets right. I think Croílár maybe deserves a bit more praise than to be deemed an OV clone. If it does a third year, there's a good chance I'll try to make it there.
Alas, the price of accommodation makes it somewhat unlikely; a group of three friends is probably paying €150 per person to an Airbnb landlord to stay there, with one bed in a hotel going for €300 for the two nights. With the price of tickets added in, suddenly you're spending what you'd spend on a major festival. Most of the artists I spoke to at the festival were doing their sets and then making their way home the same night. Yet that too is no reason to knock the festival. By all accounts, it's for the people who call Athlone and the midlands home. It's run by people from the town who are passionate about giving something back to it. And clearly, they filled venues in spite of that, so some Dublin blow-ins getting priced out shouldn't dissuade them.
And it's not like that's an Athlone problem.
One of my defences of Dublin to any emigrant has always been the incredible access to music that the city gives us, both in being a hub for the entire country's local scenes but also a sure spot on most international tours, for every type of gig from the BelloBar up to Croker, to say nothing of the DIY community fighting to keep on in the margins. Like, sure, we aren't exactly London, Berlin or NYC, but we feel a lot closer to them compared to other European cities of our size. I've seen nights where a single promoter is running five or six different gigs and I'd honestly choose to go to any of them. Yet, as we've covered many times over on Fourth Best, the city is being shaped into something hostile. For every Daylight or Kirkos, there are the closures. In December, I used my album of the year piece to reflect on the closure of The Complex. Weeks later, we saw the war for Izakaya, a war that was ultimately lost, and I honestly didn't cover it simply because I don't know how long I have in me covering the same story over and over again. Screaming infrastructure! community resilience! into the void as capital continues to consume, and all the artists I ever loved declare our spaces already dead.
The time I spent in Athlone had me hopeful that maybe the solution is to move outward. Reflecting in the months between here and there, I don't really know. I think all we can do is keep building weird things and seeing if it'll find its people. Optimism is wearing thin though. Just down the road from my home, the Anne Devlin Community Centre was a project attempting to bring life an old pub left derelict for over a decade. After a month of intimidation, hired goons with Garda onlookers arrived to remove the activists. Maybe I will end up telling the same story over and over again.
So here's to a festival that found spaces for the art to thrive where historically it hadn't. I hope to see it continue, and maybe inspire a few other flames along the way.
Fourth Best on Dublin Digital Radio's first episode aired at the start of the month. We'll be back on August 3rd with a potentially-hungover All Together Now recap.
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