Experience Father Ted at the Craggy Island Festival, July 2016

By @SimonCocking. Well beloved by many in the world of IT, this July you can recreate the experience down on Craggy Island. We spoke to the organisers.

When is it on, how can people buy tickets?

The festivities start Friday 15th July and end late Sunday night 7th July, people can only book tickets through our secure website craggyislandfestival.com we use the Stripe system (Irish based because we like to support the locals :)) and you get a ticket emailed to you, similar to a boarding pass you get and we scan that when you arrive on the island and you then get your weekend pass wristband.

What are your reasons for choosing to locate it on Inisheer ? / For what reasons does Inisheer have an affinity to father Ted?

Craggy Island Festival, is a festival separate to any others. It is based on Inis Oirr – smallest island of the 3 Aran islands, is the island you see at the start of the tv show where you see the shipwreck, it’s called (The Plassey) That’s why we chose Inis Oirr and I also used to live there and one of my best friends suggested I started having a festival on the original island 🙂

What is your favourite scene episode?

My favourite episode was the whistle theft and that was the first person I contacted about running the festival – Father Damo (Joe Rooney) He said it sounds great and contacted other characters to see if they were interested in appearing for stand up and games all weekend – he came back to me saying Father Stone (Michael Redmond) and Eoin Mc’Love (Patrick McDonnel were up for coming out as well, so with that I booked the arts centre, Áras Eanna which is on the island for 3 stand up shows, we can comfortably sit 100 people per show and tickets are limited to 300 so first to book select 1 of the 3 shows they want to go to 🙂

You were planning to use drones – what for?

Saturday there will be a treasure hunt and we hope to get everyone down to the Plassey shipwreck, and have a pilot send the drone out over the sea and zoom in like the opening credits but have all the festival goers in their outfits waving beside the shipwreck 🙂

Why do you think Father Ted is still so popular? (my kids love it too)

I think Father Ted was so well written, produced and casted so well it is timeless, in my opinion up there with Fawlty Towers, Only fools and horses, Black Books etc. It is timeless, even when I travel for expel as I’m an artist, when I’m in Spain or Belgium, Holland etc – the minute people find out your Irish they start shouting lines from their favourite episode, since we launched the festival we have had emails from Germany and Scotland expressing their interest in going to the festival, it’s amazing.

How about some Father TED talks?

Ted talks could be in the future, in the meantime we have a huge list of Games for young and old – Saturday and Sunday will be family fun during the day with a circus tent appearing on the island (Fanzini Brother doing 2 solo shows 1 Sat – 1 Sunday – Irish themed and family friendly – Funland theme park – Sports Day and Treasure hunt
Then the night time fun and games are for over 18’s and start and go on quite late 🙂
One of the highlights for the sports day will be binocular soccer.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

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