One of the biggest and best traditional music festivals in Ireland is back this January, delighted to be welcoming in-person audiences once again.
Celebrating the beating heart of Irish music, Tradfest Temple Bar returns from 26 – 30 January with a full programme of amazing artists playing live against breath-taking backdrops.
After almost two years, audiences and performers can at last enjoy the thrill of a live tunes and songs as Dublin’s famous annual trad and folk event becomes the first of the world’s major music festivals to get back to full capacity.
With 30,000 tickets now on sale for the five nights of festival performances, the stellar line-up of traditional and folk music acts, including the likes of Dervish, Fairport Convention, Four Men and a Dog, Altan and the Lost Brothers, offers the perfect chance to start 2022 on a high note.
TradFest, based around the cobbled streets of Temple Bar, Dublin’s heaving cultural quarter, will showcase top musicians and performers, the best tunes in the world and some of the Irish capital’s most historic places.
The headline venues are landmarks, many of them bound up in the fabric of Irish historical and cultural identity. From the storied halls of Dublin Castle to the splendour of the soaring gothic nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral, the TradFest live experience is made magical by the experience of just inhabiting these special spaces.
Ralph McTell at Tradfest
For 2022 the festival is expanding, embracing different spaces across Dublin and offering a range of daytime and night-time concerts in places such as Collins Barracks, the Pepper Canister Church, Lost Lane and The Button Factory.
This will also be the first time TradFest Temple Bar will present work in The National Stadium, the spiritual home of music in Dublin and a vibrant hub of trad and folk music in the 1970s and 80s.
The Dublin Legends, Ralph McTell and Stockton’s Wing will perform there on 27 January, and the venue will also stage a Female Folk Night with Aoife Scott, Peggy Seeger and more on 30 January.
Other highlights to look forward to will include Kate Rusby, often hailed as the ‘first lady of folk’, who will be at St Patrick’s Cathedral on 28 January, while acclaimed folk singer and guitarist Martin Carthy and his twice Mercury-nominated daughter Eliza will perform at the Pepper Canister Church on 29 January.
In addition, the ever-popular Smithwick’s Sessions will return to the pubs of Temple Bar and there is always the chance to stumble across a spontaneous session wherever you go in the area.
And this year, in a European first, TradFest is partnering with air disinfection specialists Novaerus to ensure the highest possible standard of safety for audiences, performers and crew.
Each festival venue will be equipped with the best-in-class air sanitisation devices, which cyclically disinfect the air of any harmful airborne pollutants.
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