Roesy + FeliSpeaks + Áine Gordon + Kevin McGahern MC
For more than two decades, Birr-born singer-songwriter and painter Roesy has been quietly building one of the most distinctive bodies of work on the Irish circuit — album after album of warm, painterly songs, delivered in a voice that seems to lower the lights in the room all by itself. A true artist in the older sense: he paints, he writes, he wanders, and the songs carry all of it. A cult favourite among those who know, and a discovery waiting to happen for those who don’t yet.
Poet, performer and playwright FeliSpeaks — Nigerian-Irish, Longford-raised — is one of the defining voices of new Irish poetry. Her work sits on the Leaving Cert English syllabus, which means a generation of Irish teenagers can quote her back at you, and she has carried spoken word from festival fields to national television as part of the collective WeAreGriot and under her own flag. Poems about womanhood, faith, identity and belonging, delivered with a preacher’s rhythm and a boxer’s timing. When she finishes, the silence lasts a beat longer than usual. Then the roof comes off.
Belfast-based singer-songwriter Áine Gordon is one of the most quietly thrilling new voices in Irish folk. Her debut EP The Stray (2025), produced by Joshua Burnside — who lends his voice and instruments throughout — announced an artist of unusual poise: layered, atmospheric songs that balance vulnerability with clarity, rooted in close personal observation. Since its release she has supported Burnside at the Ulster Hall and played the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and Sound of Belfast, drawing the kind of notices most debuts wait years for — “few artists emerge as artistically fully formed,” went one. Come early, stand near the front, and say you were there.
Comedian, writer and broadcaster Kevin McGahern has been one of the sharpest voices in Irish comedy for over a decade: presenter of The Traitors Ireland: Uncloaked, Republic of Telly, maker of Kevin McGahern’s America, panel-show regular and co-host of The Lovely Show podcast with Justine Stafford, home of the most gloriously rambling banter in the Irish podcast charts. As MC he brings the rare combination this job requires — quick enough to handle anything, generous enough to make everyone else look good, and Cavan enough to keep the whole thing moving on schedule.
