The regional festival season has already begun in earnest, and nowhere more enthusiastically than in Co Kerry.
The annual Easter arts festival, Samhlaiocht Chiarrai, brought crowds and a bewildering variety of serious and not-so-serious cultural events to the streets and public venues of Tralee over the long weekend.
The Samhlaiocht festival, however, is more than just an excuse for a high-spirited "knees-up" to entertain locals, attract visitors and boost bank holiday business. It is deeply rooted in the artistic and cultural life of the county.
The community-based festival programme is now in its eighth year.
As the festival chairman, Paul Hanrahan, put it: "We see the weekend as a platform for the work that has been gathered through the year."
While Tralee itself saw parades, exhibitions, concerts and a range of workshops covering skills from jewellery-making to jazz, the weekend included an evening of comic verse in Knocknagoshel, a literary tour of Kerry in Castleisland and poetry readings in Listowel and Waterville.
Samhlaiocht has also reached far outside the county. Three senior classes of St John's Parochial School in Tralee exhibited a cultural exchange project with a primary school in Zimbabwe.
Letters, photographs and drawings have been exchanged, and the exhibition now on view at St John's School will be transported to Harare later this year.
As well as a strong visual arts exhibition, Scoip '99, showcasing the work of contemporary Irish artists, the festival has again produced a lasting record of contemporary poetry created by emerging writers and established poets.
The anthology, Podium 4, published at the weekend, includes new work from Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Rita Ann Higgins, alongside submissions by 28 other writers from Kerry and elsewhere. The 70-page collection, published by Samhlaiocht Chiarrai, 3 Main Street, Tralee, is on sale for £5.95.
The pace is not being allowed to flag in Kerry. As the weekend events drew to a close, thousands were arriving from around Ireland, Britain and northern France for the annual International PanCeltic Festival, which runs from today until Sunday.