What's On in Monaghan

FOG Fest returns to Castleblayney for the August bank holiday weekend, with three nights of live music at St Mary’s Park, home of the Castleblayney Faughs GAA club. Each night has its own flavour: The Whistlin’ Donkeys open on the Friday with support from Ronnie & The Reptiles, Saturday is an 80s and 90s themed night with the music of Oasis, Relish and Again!, and country star Mike Denver & Band close it out on the Sunday alongside Ruaile Buaile.

It is a local festival in the best sense — a marquee weekend of country, folk and party covers pitched at a crowd that wants to dance, rather than a big-city line-up. If you are anywhere in the Monaghan–Louth–Armagh borderlands that weekend, it is the liveliest thing around.

Doors open at 8:30pm each evening, and tickets are sold through the festival website — worth sorting in advance for the bigger nights.

For one Saturday each August, painters set up their easels around Lough Muckno Park in Castleblayney for the Monaghan Plein Air Festival — a day of painting outdoors “en plein air”, with the lake, woodland and the town itself as subjects. The organisers welcome everyone from seasoned professionals to people trying outdoor painting for the first time, which gives the day an unusually open, sociable feel for an art event.

This is a participation festival rather than a spectator one: you register, bring your materials and paint. The 2026 edition also features a special guest workshop with landscape artist Kieran Guckian, ticketed separately.

Registration and workshop places are booked through the festival website, so sign up ahead rather than turning up on the day. Even if you only manage a sketchbook, the parkland around the lough makes it easy to find a quiet spot to work.

On the festival Saturday the streets from Church Square to the Diamond fill with the smells of freshly prepared food, as Monaghan town gives itself over to its summer street food festival. Food trucks and local vendors line the route, artisan producers sell cheeses, breads and meats, and local chefs give live cooking demonstrations, with musicians and street entertainment keeping the carnival mood going through the day.

It is free to wander, deliberately family-friendly — there is free kids’ entertainment alongside the stalls — and small enough that you can graze your way from one end to the other in an afternoon. The pattern is simple: arrive hungry, leave full.

If you want to make more of a night of it, the festival’s Long Table Dinner takes place the evening before, seating diners together at one long shared table for a menu built on local produce — booking details are on the festival website.

The Tydavnet Show reaches its 73rd year in 2026, which tells you most of what you need to know: this is a proper, long-running parish agricultural show, held at the show grounds at Drumshervra outside Scotstown in north Monaghan. Cattle classes and horse and pony classes are the backbone of the day, surrounded by trade stands, demonstrations and children’s entertainment.

Shows like this are where rural Monaghan turns out in force, and for a visitor that is the appeal — prize livestock being groomed and judged, competition classes of every kind, and a field full of conversation. It is an easy, unhurried day out and a genuine slice of drumlin-country life that no staged attraction can replicate.

The show is held on a Saturday in mid-August; entry details for competition classes and trade stands are on the show website. It falls on the same day as Monaghan town’s street food festival, so a determined day-tripper could manage both.

Founded in 1990 to enrich the cultural life of the county town, Harvest Time Blues has grown into one of Ireland’s leading live music festivals, and its honours list backs that up — Van Morrison, Peter Green and former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor have all played it. It returns to Monaghan town for its traditional first-weekend-of-September slot in 2026.

The format is a big part of the fun. A large marquee hosts the main stage and late-night sets, while the Blues Trail sends bands fanning out through the town’s pubs, so you can follow the music from bar to bar all weekend. The programming ranges beyond strict twelve-bar blues into funk, soul, rock, reggae and jazz.

Weekend tickets cover the marquee shows and sell in advance through the festival website, and there is a campsite option for those making a full weekend of it. Monaghan is a compact town, so everything is within a short walk.

Every September, Inniskeen — Patrick Kavanagh’s home village and the landscape of “Stony Grey Soil” and “Inniskeen Road: July Evening” — hosts a weekend of poetry, music and conversation in the poet’s honour. The 2026 edition is shaped by Unreal Cities, the curatorial team founded by actor and director Adrian Dunbar and composer Nick Roth, and explores Kavanagh’s links to the Beat Generation, timed with the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth.

The line-up mixes the starry with the strange in the best way: Beat poet Anne Waldman, Tommy Tiernan in conversation, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and a Procession of Light led by the Armagh Rhymers from the Round Tower Church through the village to the Patrick Kavanagh Centre. The Friday evening also sees the announcement of the 54th Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, adjudicated this year by Victoria Kennefick.

Events are individually ticketed (roughly €15–€35) across small village venues, so book ahead — the full programme launches in July on the festival page.

Running since 2001, the Clones Film Festival opens on the evening of Thursday 22 October and carries independent cinema through the October bank holiday weekend — features, documentaries and special screenings from regional and international filmmakers, along with workshops. Clones is the town where Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is set and was filmed, and the festival wears that heritage proudly: its short film awards are called the Francies, after the novel’s protagonist Francie Brady.

The shorts are the heart of it. An open competition draws short fiction, animation and documentary entries from around the world, while the festival’s Short Film Challenge gives filmmakers just three days to shoot and cut a complete film in the area.

It is a small-town festival with real character rather than red-carpet scale, and an excellent excuse to explore Clones — a border town with a fine Norman motte, round tower and Georgian diamond. The full 2026 programme appears on the festival site nearer the date.