Artistic licence in Galway

On the Town: Try to remember a few sponsors, always mention the artistic director and don't slag the Galway Races. That's one of the unwritten rules in relation to opening the Galway Arts Festival, and it usually works.

So, comedian Tommy Tiernan did his bit of bowing to this year's artistic director, Rose Parkinson, when he performed the honours in the Galway Bay Hotel last Monday night.

The "Brian Kerr" of arts festival management, he said of her - in between multiple expletives and a joke about "coming from a town which doesn't have an arts festival and never wants to" because it has a "f***ing shopping centre".

Apparently oblivious to the large number of children among the 800 guests, Tiernan couldn't contain himself. The real barometer of Galway was the night that the two-week festival ended and the races began, when those "Harp-loving muckers" came to town, he said. At this point some of the festival sponsors may have felt a little like choking on their oysters and Guinness.

However, the arts festival appeared to take it all in good spirit, with a fixed, if slightly nervous, smile on the face of festival manager, John Crumlish, and publicist, Paul Fahy. The pair, along with festival board member Fidelma Mullane, had already had to bid a hasty farewell to the city mayor, Alderman Catherine Connolly, who was under pressure to make a council meeting. Car clamping was on the agenda.

"A wonderful celebration of drama and creativity" in a society where market forces are held up as the "god" and consumerism is seen as something to aspire to, the mayor said before she left. She compared the festival to the actress Maureen O'Hara who was in Galway for the film fleadh the previous week. Here was a woman whose beauty and creativity had been taken for granted, and the arts festival was "a bit like that", she said.