The major theme for our 2026 Festival will be Boundaries: setting them and crossing them. The Festival will take place over the weekend of 7-9 August 2026 at Inish Beg. We are delighted to announce that the Festival will be opened by the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin.

Tickets for individual days and for the weekend are on sale here. Half days tickets will go on sale as soon as the programme is finalised. Check back on our website and on our Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts for more speaker announcements!

Full programme and timings will be released closer to the time, the speakers so far announced include:

Friday  7 August - afternoon/evening with a 3pm start

Writer and political commentator Iain Dale has recently edited a collection of profiles of the Taoisigh and will interview a panel of three of the contributors to that book. They are Gary Murphy (who wrote on Charles Haughey), Deirdre Foley (who wrote on Liam Cosgrave), and Stephen Collins (on Jack Lynch).

Saturday 8 August - morning/afternoon

Cormac Moore on the Irish Boundary Commission, subject of his latest book

Lewis Baston on his book Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders

Sam McBride discussing the book For and Against a United Ireland, which he co-authored with Fintan O'Toole

Alexander Morrison on 'Beyond the 'Great Game' - boundaries and border-making in the Russian conquest of Central Asia'

Beatrice Penati on 'Divide and Rule? How the Soviet stans got their borders'

Gabriel Cooney speaking about Crossing the boundaries between life and death in prehistory drawing on aspects of his book Death in Irish prehistory

Zoe Reid, Keeper of Manuscripts at the National Archives, speaking about the publication of 1926 census, the first in the Irish Free State

Oscar Kelly on his research about the founding of  Castletownshend in West Cork, and Glenbarrahane, a settlement which predated Castletownshend and was forgotten

Myles Dungan on his forthcoming book The Waterboys: triumph, tragedy and the two Irishmen who created California about William Mulholland and Michael M. O'Shaughnessy, who brought water to Los Angeles and San Francisco in controversial circumstances

Rachel Barrett of the London Archives on Irish Paupers in London in the 19th century

Saturday 8 August - evening

Screenings of three fascinating films on aspects of West Cork's history, including the first screening of a new film about Cork sculptor Seamus Murphy.

Sunday 9 August - morning

To mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver's Travels in 1726, we will have two speakers on very different aspects of Jonathan Swift's life. Hester Grant's book, The Twittenham Summer: The Upside-Down World of Three Friends and the Writing of Gulliver's Travels focuses on the summer of 1726, when Swift arrived in London from Dublin, with a draft of Gulliver's Travels in his bag. Adam Tomkins will speak on Swift & the Constitution, a lecture in honour of James Kingston.

They will then be interviewed on the subject of Swift by Myles Dungan, for a piece to be broadcast on Myles' RTE History Show in the autumn

Sunday 9 August - afternoon

Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, authors of Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women as well as a podcast of the same name

Leanne Calvert on her recent book  Life, love and family in Presbyterian Ulster

Sonja Tiernan, speaking about Eva Gore-Booth to mark the anniversary edition of Sonja's biography of the activist, writer and poet

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