A Year of Festivals in Ireland

Meet Mark Graham, Conker Champion of Ireland, All-Ireland Bucket-Singing Champion and the sixth-best bog snorkeler in Ireland. Rejected by the banks as he looked to start on the journey to home ownership, Mark started in an altogether more interesting and exciting journey to attend three festivals a week for a year. In this entertaining roller-coaster tour of Ireland, Mark paints a picture not of a broken and maudlin country that lost the run of itself, but of a people with a wealth of character, imagination, generosity, wildness, curiosity, creativity and an insatiable hunger for fun and divilment. The surprising array of weird and wonderful festivals around Ireland are matched and surpassed by the cohort of characters and clients who attend them. Throwing himself into the thick of these gatherings may have nearly killed him, but he survived his year of festivals, enjoyed almost every minute and was left with a tale or two to tell.