Events – Page 6 – Joerg's Ramblings

Festival Sponsorship not the way it should be?

Junior Minister Michael Ring (Tourism & Sport) has announced which festivals will get funding from Failte Ireland this year and there are some oddities among them. In total 23 national festivals and events are getting 1.8mio in 2016, but some should get (a lot) less and others should get more. Have a look at the list here, before you continue reading so that you can form your own opinion first.

One single festival takes the majority of money and really just leaves crumbs for the rest: The St. Patrick’s Festival sucks up a whole 1 mio and I really don’t think it is worth that amount. While the parade has significantly improved from the parades 10 or 20 years ago, it has come to a standstill for many years now. There is no more improvement and year after year, the same formula with just slight alterations will be applied. The festival route is still too short for the amount of people that would like to see something and are left bitterly disappointed and the festival would definitely benefit from an overhaul. Sure, there are still up to approximately 300,000 people on the streets for it (don’t believe the 500k lie!!) but in terms of cultural value, the St. Patrick’s Day Festival is definitely not the top event!

And a little further down the list, there are these four:
Ireland BikeFest EUR 30,000
Bloomsday EUR 25,000
City Spectacular EUR 25,000
Rock n Roll, Dublin Half Marathon EUR 20,000

The Bikefest hasn’t really impressed in recent years and 30k seems relatively high for that, where the Bloomsday uses up 25k is difficult to see and that the 100% commercial Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon gets ANY funding is extremely surprising. But the City Spectacular on the other hand, which is one of the, if not THE best event in Dublin only gets 25k!? That’s odd!! They deserve a LOT more!

St. Patrick’s Parade – Lies and Statistics – Round 2

Irish journalism largely consists of re-printing press releases or even copying from each other and just re-printing what another newspaper already had said. Last week I wrote about the incorrect numbers about parade attendees that every year are spread. 500,000 is the claim, which is actually impossible because the streets of Dublin are not wide enough. And again the same lies were repeated this year: www.rte.ie/news/2012/0317/stpatricksday_ireland.html
www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/thousands-enjoy-inclusive-st-patricks-day-parades-543938.html
www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0317/breaking3.html
This year, I checked myself and found a few interesting facts:
+ Even if you are tall, you can hardly see any pedestrian parade participants if you are further back than 7 people from the parade route boundary.
+ People at the front arrived at 08:00. That is 4 hours before the parade started!
+ While there are LOTS of people in O’Connell Street, the crowds are not more than 5 deep between Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
+ On average there is a depth of significantly less than 30 people (15 on each side of the street) along the parade route. And only about a third of them can see the parade.

And the result? If you can fit a generous 2.5 people per metre and with a depth of 15 people on each side. The 2.7km parade route was lined by a max of 202,500 people and less than half of them (approx. 94500) actually SAW the parade! This is a lot lower than I generously calculated last week: www.joergsteegmueller.com/2012/03/15/st-patricks-parade-lies-and-statistics/
500,000 is impressive, but the realistic 94,500 is not so much!! By the way, there were certainly another thousands of people searching for a suitable viewing position, but they never saw anything, so something should be done! Or is it maybe not a high priority to get people to SEE the parade? Maybe luring thousands into the City Centre and claiming that lots were there is more important?

Category: Events

Festival Sponsorship not the way it should be?

St. Patrick’s Parade – Lies and Statistics – Round 2