The desk is large and clear and the view is over a carpark. I am listening attentively as the general manager tells me what his company has been doing. But somehow the software has been scrambled. Although Declan Gibbons speaks calmly and reasonably, as if explaining his company's decision to raise the Riboflavin level in its cereal, his company is Macnas and what he is saying is completely mad.
"We wanted to do a story of the night and so we came up with pirates. Night pirates. The pirates have stolen the sun and plunged the world into darkness. These are the ships. They're junk ships with wheelbarrows and musicians on them who've turned into bagpipe players. The pirates sing accompanied by these bag-pipe players."
All around the wall are Tom Conroy's beautiful white on black designs for the Night Parade, which will move off from Eyre Square, Galway, tomorrow night at 10 p.m. He has plundered the mythologies of the world for inspiration: Egyptian horses are stepping out with African witch doctors and Minoan bulls. No wonder Declan Gibbons seems to have lost his marbles. Probably all 400-plus people involved in the parade have lost their marbles too, and so no one even notices.
The parade moves evenly along Declan Gibbons's wall. Light has not quite faded when it begins and moves along Merchant's Road and Spanish Parade, but as night falls its nature changes: "The fire bird will wait here at Jury's - as the parade meets the firebird it will ignite and lead us across the bridge, then it will go along the Claddagh to South Park. We have to ramp the wall because we can't knock it." The Macnas glimmer men have asked the residents at Claddagh Quay and Merchant's Road to turn off their lights.
Members of Groupe F., a leading firework outfit from France who lit up last year's World Cup as well as the Barcelona Olympics, have been the Vulcans of the piece: "They have this flaming bird which can burn for two hours. It's like a fire sculpture but it has a power source. In the nightmare section, the horse blows fire. For the finale we want to create a wall of fire and the parade moves into the wall and the fireworks begin."
The parade moves into a wall of fire. Get me out of this madhouse! "At this point we're 95 per cent sure what will happen in the parade itself, but the finale . . ." admits Gibbons. "We have to talk about it with the safety officer. We have to go through with them exactly what they're burning."
The warehouses at the Fisheries Field have been humming for six weeks now, as 50 to 80 people at a time - from volunteers to Fas workers to students on a scheme, to youth projects, to a travellers' project - create the creatures which will make up the parade. Declan Gibbons takes me around as breezily as if it were a cornflakes packing plant. In the first warehouse, the horse stands forlornly, with a label hanging from him: "This horse leaks if tipped. This way up." Why? "He has a smoke machine inside him. He's recycled, he's from Capall, a show we did about five years ago, but this year he'll have smoke coming out of his nostrils."
Creatures who have been put out to grass loll around watching the proceedings with that air of sanity denied to the workers: "There's Mummy and Daddy and baby Firbolg - they're having a rest this year, they're nearly 10 years old." Two black dogs lie about with a resigned air. "What's his name?" I ask, pointing to one of them, pressing the "mundane" button to return to sanity: "L. Ron. After a science fiction writer. He's credited with starting Scientology."
Tom Conroy is sketching monsters and Matthew Guinnane is painting them, as prototypes, from the kind of poster paint-box you'd get in a lucky bag: "They started as `Romper Monsters'," explains Conroy. "But they're developed into `Matthew's Monsters'. It's very much his own kind of work that he does."
Something about the paint-box prompts me to ask Conroy is he nervous, but he is infected enough by the atmosphere of the place to laugh at the idea.
If it's a loony bin, it is one with a waiting list: "The sun helps. Everyone's in great form. Romance is blossoming. In the evening everyone's bringing their work out onto the grass," says Aine Lawless, sitting at a mask-making table with her arm in plaster.
She broke it when she fell off a pair of stilts. Lisa Sweeney from Roscommon may be making masks now, but she's here on a mission: "I saw a Macnas parade about five years ago and ever since then it has been my dream to drum."
Outside a great, bandaged giant, who will be routinely wakened during the parade by an intentionally discordant choir from Ballinrobe, lies on the gravel. There is no warehouse space available and so he has to be wrapped, painted on a fine day, and wrapped again. The lighthouse, the chariot and the pirate ship lie beside it. Then there's the bed. "There's a lot of activity going on underneath the sheets," explains Gibbons.
"Originally we were calling this the `orgy scene'. Every now and then a head pops up and has a cigarette." His reassurance - "It's very innocent, bring the kids" - falls flat.
John Arbuckle from Belfast is standing in a tent with a huge owl, a mob of monsters and an electric eel. A Fas worker, he explains that he started his artistic career doing murals: "Not King Billy. Dodgier than that." "He's our resident Orangeman," explains Gary McMahon of Macnas. "When I came to the interview I told you I could juggle chickens," remembers Arbuckle.
We are suddenly lost in a school of "sprats and fronds", or boys and girls from Foroige, Ballinfoyle, being marshalled with the words: "Step together, step together!" This is the only sighting of the parade's director, Dominic Campbell, reported to be "the most patient man in the world". British-based and the director of several projects for the LIFT arts events company, he was spotted by Macnas from his puppet-work for the St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin.
I am drawn to a purdah of women high in the rafters of one of the warehouses. There is the pleasant hum of sewing machines, as more than 400 items in this year's collection are turned out to hang on the rails: "For the pirates . . . this is the look . . . sort of leather and fins . . . quite fishy." Julie Tormey moonlights as a samba dancer and is just back from Rio: "People there live to dance. That is what their life is about," she says. "Otherwise you swing out of a hammock six days a week and then fish. It's the weather that makes the difference. If you were in Mweenish Island or somewhere you'd need to work or you'd go mad." Which is surely anything but the case in this refuge within the world of Macnas, you think, until Tormey sees you eyeing the carpet, which features Snow White and the boys, not to mention Cinderella and family gambolling across the thick pile. "That carpet," she says comfortably. "It's the only thing that keeps us sane."
The Macnas parade, Cargo de Nuit, sets off from Eyre Square, Galway, tomorrow night at 10 p.m. and goes down Merchant's Road and Spanish Parade, across Wolfe Tone Bridge, along Claddagh Quay and up Nimmo's Pier. The fireworks will start at around 11 p.m. and will be visible from South Park and the Claddagh. The Galway Arts Festival continues through the week.