Lights! Cameras! Catapult! Action!

This line-up can make almost anything happen – from private parties to public festivals, writes PATSEY MURPHY

WHEN YOU CONSIDER that, very recently, 3,657 people dressed up in Where's Wallycostumes in three locations, 1,500 men, women and children bopped around on space hoppers in Merrion Square during the World Street Performance Championships, and punters voluntarily slid across a zip wire in their hundreds in the RDS, it seems that we have taken to the street more in merriment than in anger, despite all our troubles.

Marathons have never been as popular and have led to a growing obsession with triathlons; boot camps have people pulling up their socks in full view of passers-by, and participation at many a hardy annual event, such as Galway and Kilkenny arts festivals, was well up on last year. We may be down, but we’re still going out. We like a good party, complete with special effects.

One of the companies that have made many a public event memorable has an interesting back story and a huge bag of tricks. Catapult Event Production and Design, established by Ronan Healy in 1999, has been behind some of the most inventive happenings and visuals we have feasted upon ever since, and it all springs from a modest office on Dublin’s Exchequer Street.

Healy conjured up his first show as a student at UCD in 1994, a fundraiser for the Simon Community that drew 3,000 people to the RDS over three days. It was called The Global Experience - in 1994 we were embracing all things global - and it was a themed fashion show that involved getting engines from Aer Lingus, sponsorship of £20,000-plus, strip lighting and booming sound. . Pulling in the special effects, the favours, the money and the adrenalin was great fun, Healy recalls. A whizz kid was born.

He followed that with a stint building sets and a spell in an ad agency (“I’m your marketing man”) and thus set about stacking up his deck of calling cards. He went off to Australia for two years, and was inspired by all manner of spectacles, taking in the performances at the Sydney Opera House while moonlighting as a waiter. Then he returned to Dublin to set up Catapult, and waitering kept him going while things got off the ground.

And off the ground they got, with images projected on water, maps imprinted on a Martello tower; and enormous inflated marketing objects set afloat on pontoons in the rivers Liffey and Lee. “We soon got a reputation for doing bizarre stuff,” he says with no uncertain pride, which the company supplemented with bread and butter seminars, conferences, awards, exhibitions and launches. All the while his contacts book and the Catapult team continued to grow.

“The policy has always been to find people who can do something better than you, says Steve O’Sullivan (the ideas man). “We’ve really fine-tuned the best suppliers.” This pertains to everything from fireworks to flowers; cameras and caterers; furniture and generators; rigging, security, insurance, searchlights, screens, sets, props and stages. And everyone from artists and performers, carpenters, technicians, staffing and crew. Fancy a stratosphere? Printed novelties? A waterscreen? They created a 120ftx60ft high waterscreen that spanned the Liffey during the Heineken Green Energy festival – “totally weather dependent but simply amazing,” says O’Sullivan.

The team includes Des O'Leary, technical director, Louise Craig, business developer and adventurist Gavin Fogarty. We've seen them in action at a number of Irish Timesevents and would be tempted to have them order our domestic lives. There is a competitive spirit at work and they keep a beady eye out for new technology, concepts and products. "Ronan gets the airplanes; I get to Google," O'Sullivan says. And so they continue to shock and awe business folk, with, say, a surprise trampoline artist bounding down from the rafters at the Business to Arts awards; produce holograms for candidates at Innovation Awards; and ensure public safety at potentially problematic events such as the World Street Performance Championships (fire jugglers combined with large crowds must shorten the lives of insurance executives).

What’s next? Watch as the Adventure Weekend concept gets bigger. Catapult has grand plans “to make Ireland the New Zealand of the northern hemisphere”, bringing jobs, tourism and fitness with it. A very big adventure indeed.