About The Festival

“When the songs have stopped being sung, the ancestors are truly dead. When the stories have stopped being told, we all fall asleep. And when we wake up, what are we waking up to?”

Samhain is the first of four traditional festivals on the old Irish calendar celebrating the arrival of Winter. Traditionally, Winter is celebrated as the first, not the last season of the Celtic year; the darkness from which all light emerges. This was a philosophy that carried into all areas of our lives.

Every people have enshrined in their culture a special time of year when the gates of perception are flung open and otherworldly spirits walk among the living. As a festival of birth, death and ancestral ceremony, Samhain stands on this threshold between worlds. This is also a time when our ancestral wildness has an opportunity to emerge; A chance to engage with and to celebrate the primordial wildness that dwells inside each of us.

Clonakilty Samhain festival is a traditional community festival that celebrates Irish culture, music, folklore and myth. The festival culminates with the Samhain Parade in which hundreds of visual artists, performers, composers and musicians explore the roots of our shared Celtic culture in one of Ireland’s largest collaborative art events.