Festival format is ‘jaded’ says former president

September 1995

GOLDEN Rose recipient, Denis Reen, hit out this week at what he describes as the Festival’s ‘jaded’ formula and warned that a major re-think is urgently needed.

Mr Reen, a former Festival president, who was awarded, a prestigious Golden Rose this week for outstanding service to the Festival, told a surprised audience at the awards ceremony on Tuesday that he had to do “an amount of soul searching” before eventually deciding to accept the accolade.

He expressed his concern that the Festival was not moving with the times and was in danger of losing its edge. In a later interview with The Kerryman Mr Reen went further and said he felt the Festival of Kerry had lost touch with the local people in Tralee.

“We are persisting with the same formula, we’ve been using since 1974 and it has become tired. We have a very professionally-run festival but the fact is that we’ve lost touch and we’ve failed to realise what is going on,” he said.

“There are possibly too many events which are geared towards young people. I think we may have lost the families and the older people and we need to get them back.” Mr Reen said that in its 37 years in existence, the Festival of Kerry had gone through two main periods of change.

The first phase was in the late 50’s/early 60’s when the festival was starting to grow and attract bigger numbers of overseas visitors. The second phase was in 1972 when The Dome and the Rose Ball were introduced and the job of compere at the Rose selection was taken on show by Gay Bryne. While the event has gone from strength to strength since then and now regularly tops the TAM ratings on RTÉ, he believes it is now time for phase three.

“We badly need phase three to rekindle the interest of local people. If the local people are not enthusiastic about the festival, then it takes from the atmosphere around the town,” he said.

However, he said, he believes the Festival of Kerry Committee had taken the first positive step by calling in an outside consultant to examine the festival and its structures and bring back a report.

“What we urgently need is to holdon to the best of the old ideas and bring in some new ones,” he said.

He added that the drop in numbers attending this years Festival could be attributed to the same tired jaded formula still being used by the Festival.

Festival of Kerry PRO, John Galvin, said the Festival Committee accepted Mr Keen’s comments that there was need for change in the Festival format.

Listowel library.