The Earagail Arts Festival is on the move, reflecting the reality of thedispersed community it is rooted in, reports Hugh Linehan

For most of us, the idea of a festival is usually associated with one place, a town or a city or even just a big field where everyone congregates for a few days for a communal experience. But how do you mount a festival in an area of rural dispersed settlement, an area such as north Co Donegal? The answer, it seems, is to name your festival after the area's most imposing physical feature - in this case the mountain which dominates the landscape - and take it to the people.

"The whole ethos of this festival is to spread it out," says Angela McLaughlin, director of Earagail Arts Festival. "Earagail doesn't work like that, in terms of being able to walk into a town and seeing the posters and the signs and the activity. So when people ask "where's your festival club?", for example, well, we can't have one because there's no one centre. So even getting out marketing and publicity material is different - it's about using your local radio station and your local newspapers to get the message out."

Traolach Ó Fionnáin is arts officer on Donegal County Council and founded the Earagail festival 16 years ago. "In the early days, the models for the festival would have been Galway and Sligo," he says. "But it didn't make sense for us to pick any one town, because of our remit. It made more sense to spread it out. With the council and the arts festival, we work that way throughout the year. We have four different festivals throughout the year, and they're all based on links with local groups or local committees. So you might be coming back to a group in November who you were working with in May. Earagail's part of that continuity."

The strategy reflects the reality of life as it is lived in north Co Donegal, says McLaughlin. "The reality here is that you have to have a car, unless you work in your immediate area, which would be very unusual. You don't have a public transport network, and people don't think twice about driving an hour up the road."

Co Donegal's cultural specifics - its traditional music, its diaspora - are also reflected in the programming of the festival. "In the first year we had a big Scottish element, which is interesting, because that's back again this year in a big way," says Ó Fionnáin. Given the county's history of emigration to and interaction with Scotland, it's a natural fit.

"Absolutely. And the timing of the festival, around the middle of July, was obviously to fit with the holiday season in the North starting, but it's gone beyond that now. Now it's getting visitors from all over the country and beyond."

Sixteen years on, the geographical spread remains the same, across north Co Donegal from Dungloe on the western seaboard to Carndonagh and Culdaff on the north-eastern tip of the Inishowen peninsula. "But there are now a lot more venues within that spread," says Ó Fionnáin. And facilities have improved over the years, although many events still take place in local church halls.

This year, says McLaughlin, the festival has a number of major events and strands, along with the one-off gigs (which include Bob Geldof, John Martyn and Erin McKeown, along with a range of traditional musicians, from Paddy Glackin to Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine). "Music and visual arts are the two great strengths, and the musical tradition is always going to be there," she says. "But it's good to change focus each year."

That Irish-Scottish connection is explored through An Leabhar Mór, an exhibition showcasing the response of 100 visual artists - 50 from Ireland and 50 from Scotland - to 100 Gaelic poems spanning almost every century from the sixth to the 21st, along with related music, literature and film events. A range of family-friendly events culminate in Dreamtime/Aisling, an installation of projections, lasers and pyrotechnics on Magheroarty Beach.

The Form series of exhibitions, readings, films and performances in Letterkenny includes contributions from Californian art film-maker The Polyester Prince and veteran cult figure Billy Childish, but centres on the writer/ performer/artist Gerard Mannix Flynn, who is bringing his "extallation", Victim Impact Report, and his wall-mounted text pieces, Not to Be Read in Open Court, to Letterkenny, as well as planning as-yet-unspecified further assaults on the consciousness of the town. Flynn's interrogation of this country's history of institutional abuse has the potential to be particularly powerful in Co Donegal, where many stories of abuse remain untold. And writer/performer Little John Nee returns to the festival with a new show, Rural Electric, commissioned by Earagail, which will play at six different venues across the county.

"This is very much a comedy," Nee says of Rural Electric, which is set in 1959 in one of the last parishes in the country to receive electrification. "The music's by Laura Sheeran, which is one of the great delights of the show. There's a car chase in it, there's gratuitous violence. There's a priest with a dark past. It's about sexual awakening. One of the points about it is that rural electrification took so fucking long. Buncrana had the electric in 1905. So you had parishes with electrification and parishes without."

"This is a regional festival which happens to be in one of the most physically impressive parts of the country," adds Nee, whose work has been associated with Earagail for a long time. "So when you're touring you're experiencing that. Tonight Dungloe, tomorrow Dunfanaghy, so you learn why it is the way it is through the people. The way you interact with the community - there's no pretentiousness in it. An opening night is not just packed with press and liggers, and there aren't all the expectations that go with that. Don't get me wrong - there's still expectations that it had better be good.

"I did The Ballad of Jah Kettle, which was a kind of a punk show, at the foot of Errigal. On the railway line we had a set which was a sort of a train carriage, and I'm there all peroxided up with a guitar, ready to go. People are coming up, asking is it suitable for children. 'Ah, there's some bad language, nothing you wouldn't hear at home.' So, come showtime, there's 100 people there, ranging from grannies to six-year-olds, with punk songs and bad language and stuff about heroin. In Donegal, you don't get that marketing separation of audiences."

"Certainly, we're developing audiences," says McLaughlin. "And that's something I'm very conscious of. Because we're using the venues we're using, creating theatres in parish halls, there's some kind of connection there, and people know a play might be on there, and a trust builds up."

"What I like about doing these shows in Donegal is that you see them in context," says Nee. "This show was commissioned by Earagail, so it's for Donegal. I don't care if it travels outside Donegal. In fact, it isn't even for Donegal, it's for Dunfanaghy; the set was designed to fit in Dunfanaghy Hall. So it's specifically for those places."

Does the region's distance from the country's main population centres constitute a difficulty or an opportunity when it comes to programming a festival, I wonder.

"I think it's an opportunity, certainly when you're contacting artists outside the country," says McLaughlin. "They're taken with the idea of coming to this rural area and playing to these audiences."

Does Nee think of Co Donegal as a place apart? "Well, I'm sure every place is a place apart," he says. "But it does have its own traditions and there's that historical thing about it being part of Ulster, then separated from Ulster. And it is geographically isolated to an extent."

That geographical isolation has historically been linked with economic stagnation, and with high levels of outward emigration, but the county has benefited to some extent from the economic upswing. Letterkenny, with its cranes, its ring roads, its new housing estates and its traffic jams, is the very epitome of a modern Irish boom town in all its ugliness and vigour.

"Letterkenny is absolutely flying," agrees Ó Fionnáin. "But Gweedore has had a fierce body-blow over the last couple of years, with pretty much the collapse of the industrial estate. They're back in the 1980s again."

For McLaughlin, that means ticket prices are an important issue. "We have to be very conscious of our pricing, and of how much people might have to spend," she says. "So our prices are kept very low compared to other festivals around the country. It's financially difficult. We have a very modest budget, compared to other festivals which I would see as being of equal standing to ourselves. We have a very small team - one and a half full-time members of staff. We depend on those committees and those volunteers to make it work. It's technically challenging, but you couldn't do that without those people on the ground. The festival would collapse tomorrow without that."

She pays tribute to the county council, which is the festival's most significant local backer, but points out that other sources of finance, particularly commercial sponsors, are hard to come by. "It is difficult, because if you look at the economic structure of Donegal, we have very, very few large companies here," she says. "So sponsorship, which is a big buzzword everywhere, is almost irrelevant here. They don't have the money to give, and I find it difficult when going back to funders to explain that.

"I think you've got to match your funding to the area, and it's not realistic to expect the sort of sponsorship funding you'll see in Dublin or Galway or Kilkenny. But it's interesting, if you look at what the Arts Council says about developing new audiences, if you took Earagail apart and examined it, it's the dream festival from that point of view."