Emmet O’Brien + Daragh Fleming + Driven Snow + Ger Staunton MC
Emmet O’Brien is a poet from Cabra and one of the defining voices of Dublin’s spoken word resurgence — the scene’s own filídh, as one profile crowned him. Best known for viral pieces The North Side and Dirty Dublin, he has published collections of poetry, founded the poetry-and-music night Vybrations to give newcomers a stage, and built a devoted following for performances that swing from grief to giddiness inside a single line. This is working-class Dublin storytelling with the guard fully down — faith, loss, mental health and the neighbourhood that made him. When the last line lands, you’ll know all about it.
Cork writer and mental-health advocate Daragh Fleming is the author of Lonely Boy — a frank, funny and generous book about male loneliness, friendship and learning to mind yourself — and one of the most refreshing voices in the national conversation about the head and what goes on in it. A columnist, speaker and spoken-word performer, he has a rare gift for making the hard stuff feel light enough to lift. Proof that talking about mental health doesn’t have to be heavy, just honest.
Driven Snow are Kieran McGuinness and Emily Aylmer — husband and wife, formerly of Delorentos and Republic of Loose respectively (Emily also sang with Sinéad O’Connor) — making dreamy, harmony-rich indie-pop written late at night while their three children slept. Their debut A Kind of Dreaming (2024) was hailed as “sublime” by The Irish Times and “bewitching” by the Irish Independent, and their second album, Mother of Christ, lands this September — a month before they reach Castlebar. Songs about love, loss and the reality of making art in modern Ireland, sung in close harmony by two people who mean it.
Castlebar’s own Ger Staunton is the deadpan stand-up the Sunday Independent called a rising star, with a decade of clubs and festivals across Ireland, Europe and the US behind him — “incredibly funny” per the Examiner, and “one of the best comedy writers in Ireland” per The International Comedy Club. He’s an actor too, with a lead role in the award-nominated feature The Highest Brasil, and he filmed his live special at the TF Royal, five minutes from this stage. As MC, he knows the room because it’s his backyard.
