THE flappers, bootleggers, and high kickers were packing their bags yesterday as the third Guinness Roaring Twenties Festival drew to a conclusion.
The theme event, more akin to the Galway Oyster Festival than anything else in the Guinness festival calendar, brought hundreds of revellers from all over Ireland and further afield to Killarney for a holiday weekend of feather boas, barbershop quartets, and bad guys with their molls.
The festival marked the official start of the Killarney tourism season and, according to Mr Brian Brown of Guinness, it is already rated in the top 10 events out of more than 100 which the company supports each year.
As well as barbershop quartets from Britain and Holland, members of the US Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Singing performed at venues all over the town and have promised to return with more enthusiasts next year.
Restaurants, pubs and shops turned the clock back 70 years to recreate an authentic 1920s atmosphere as Killarney became caught up in the charleston, foxtrot and tango. It culminated in the Great Gatsby Ball, which catered for 400 people who danced through the night to the music of the Palm Court Theatre Orchestra from Britain.
And just to remind people that way back then it wasn't all gangsters and illicit booze, Guinness researchers came up with the following: "Did you know that back in the 1920s Professor Albert Einstein caused a stir in Berlin when he suggested that the universe could be measured; that the police chief in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, ordered women to wear skirts no shorter than four inches below the knee; that a group of American churchmen condemned jazz music as a return to the jungle; and that H.L. Mencken described prohibition as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".