Slane is on this August, but Lisdoonvarna is off after the promoters of the two-day event which was making a comeback after 17 years postponed it for one more year because of the lack of a headline act.
Mr Jim Shannon, of Southsound Productions, said much of the preparations had been carried out but REM, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie all bowed out of the £1.7 million event which was to have been held in July at its original 140-acre site between Lisdoonvarna and Doolin in north Co Clare.
"We needed confirmation around February or March and Lisdoonvarna was going to come back with a big act. It was the biggest in its time and it needed something of that stature to come back," Mr Shannon said.
He and the other original partner, Mr Paddy Doherty, have teamed up with Mr Vince Power, of the Mean Fiddler, who runs fleadhs in Britain and the US, to revive the festival which ran from 1978 to 1983.
"They have a lot of experience and a lot of equipment. For them, it is moving the circus on to each place," Mr Shannon said. But for this year, Bruce Springsteen and REM are not touring, Paul McCartney has turned them down, and David Bowie's wife, Iman, is having a baby, an excuse which today's thirty-something generation who remembered the carefree, heady days of the early 1980s might appreciate.
For fear there would be nothing for a new generation of festival-goers willing to endure the unpredictable north Clare weather, he added that it was planned to have up to 70 other bands, providing a continuous concert over the two days.
"We are so far away from the main centres, especially Dublin, you need to have a bill that has something for everybody."
Mr Shannon was in his early 20s when he promoted the original festival, the first three-day open-air one in the State. "We started off as a folk traditional festival, headlined with the Chieftains. It was the first time we had Irish traditional acts on a big open-air rock stage."
In 1981, when Chris de Burgh played, Lisdoonvarna was the biggest festival in Europe, attracting 40,000 people a day to the site. Other years, it featured Rory Gallagher and Jackson Browne.
The festival ended when the Republic was going through a recession and Mr Shannon says that in today's economic boom, the time is ripe for a revival.
"We always had a Woodstock touch to it. It was a real festival. Everything is so sanitised nowadays, it seems to me. There isn't any real festival in Ireland now, there isn't anything like the big old ones, You came and you camped and mucked out."