Galway Arts Festival has a great line-up and a new critic, writes LORNA SIGGINS.

PAUL Fahy had some prescience in sporting a swimming robe for a Galway Arts Festival photoshoot last week. After a weekend of constant rain, it was a somewhat sodden city that marked the festival opening by Druid Theatre director Garry Hynes last night.

Yet even if the sun hadn’t emerged from under the carpet of cloud pulling itself up over Black Head and the Burren, there was much to be excited about. Not just the Michael Clark Company, the Kronos Quartet, and Propeller’s double dollop of Shakespeare but also Hynes’s new interpretation of Tom Murphy’s classic The Gigli Concert.

A feast of visual art opened two days ago, with work by Hughie O’Donoghue, David Hockney, Ger Sweeney, Sean Cotter and Dolores Lyne on offer. And with New York Dolls, Primal Scream and Femi Kuti in the Big Top, the Neil Cowley trio and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra in the Radisson, and Galway Youth Theatre’s collaborations at Nun’s Island, the western capital is again spoiled for choice.

However, it was hardly surprising to read Charlie Adley’s column in the current edition of the Connacht Tribune. Adley writes: “We Galwegians used to be married to the Galway Arts Festival. We lived in the same place, loved each other, had our ups and downs, of course, but generally knew that we were good together. These days, the people of Galway feel so divorced from the Galway Arts Festival they can barely remember what it was like to love it.”

While paying due homage to the “plethora of extremely talented people who put a vast amount of creativity and energy into the two-week splurge”, Adley said that the word on the street was that the shows were “simply too expensive”.

Yes, he would like to hear Femi Kuti, the New York Dolls, Primal Scream, for which he would pay €112 “to stand at all three gigs”, but if he is on the dole he would still have to pay €110, he wrote. “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he appealed to the arts festival, “the tiger is dead, and we’re trying to stay alive by picking mouthfuls from its rotten corpse.”

It isn’t only ticket prices that has Adley going. Once again, one of the two free street events, the Macnas parade, is starting at the very un-child-friendly hour of 10pm, on a Sunday night. “Parents simply won’t want to expose small children to crushed hordes of drunken midnight revellers,” he writes.

His positive suggestions? Quadruple the street theatre, return Macnas to the afternoon, and offer a “hefty price concession” on all tickets sold to locals, upon production of a locally-addressed utility bill.

Galway Arts Festival was unable to comment on Adley’s points yesterday, but ticket sales were reportedly “brisk” in the box office on Merchants Road.