What's On in Sligo

Enniscrone’s summer festival packs five days of live music, beach events, family activities, food and late-night entertainment into the West Sligo seaside town, right on the Wild Atlantic Way. It is very much a whole-town affair — the programme spills across pubs, the seafront and the beach rather than a single festival site.

The 2026 headliners lean towards big Irish party acts: All Folk’d Up open the festival on the Thursday night, with singer Jack Keogh playing the Friday. Around the gigs there is a broad mix of sport, beach fun and children’s entertainment through the weekend.

With so much of the programme built around the beach and the streets, the festival slots easily into a family seaside break. Headline concerts are ticketed and popular, so book those ahead; details are published through the festival’s Enniscrone Events channels.

Sligo town’s food festival takes over Queen Maeve Square for a weekend, gathering more than thirty food vendors on the banks of the Garavogue River. The main stage hosts cookery demonstrations from visiting celebrity chefs — Shane Smith and Sunil Guy are among the 2026 names — alongside local culinary talent, with live music running through both days.

It is set up as a family day out as much as a foodie one: there is a children’s cookery area, face painting and cupcake decorating, plus a paid kids’ zone with zorbing and trampolines. Admission is kept low at €5, with children under 12 free when accompanied by a ticketed adult; food, drink and the kids’ zone activities are extra.

Tickets are sold in advance through the festival website. The square is right in the town centre, so it pairs well with a wander around Sligo’s shops and cafés either side of a session.

Sligo Racecourse’s big week of the summer is its two-day August meeting: an evening of flat racing on Wednesday 5 August, followed by a national hunt card on Thursday 6 August, which doubles as Ladies Day. Evening racing suits a holiday schedule nicely — you can fit in a full day on the coast and still make the first race.

For those who want to make a proper evening of it, the racecourse offers hospitality packages that bundle admission and a racecard with a two-course meal in a reserved area of the restaurant.

If you miss August, Sligo races again on Wednesday 19 August (another evening national hunt card), with afternoon jumps meetings on Wednesday 30 September and Friday 23 October rounding out the 2026 season. Fixture details and tickets are on the County Sligo Races website.

Tubbercurry’s festival builds to the Old Fair Day itself on Wednesday 12 August, when the streets fill with hundreds of exhibitors, more than fifty traditional craft and heritage demonstrations — basket weaving, pottery, thatching, wood turning, butter making — plus artisan food stalls, vintage machinery displays and street performances.

The days before it are a proper small-town festival: live music, dance workshops, a Little Folks Fair of children’s crafts, a teddy bears’ picnic, a duck race and a free outdoor concert from country singer Jimmy Buckley. Local drama group the Phoenix Players mark their 80th anniversary during the 2026 festival too.

The street events are free, and the fair day in particular is a great shout for families — though Tubbercurry is busy that Wednesday, so arrive early for parking.

Named for the closing line of W. B. Yeats’s poem “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”, Tread Softly is Sligo’s late-summer celebration of the Yeats family’s creative legacy — the poet, but also the wider artistic household that drew so much from this landscape. It is presented by Blue Raincoat Theatre and the Hawk’s Well Theatre in collaboration with Sligo County Council, and the programme ranges across theatre, gallery tours, walks and performance at venues throughout the town and county.

Because it is spread Sligo-wide rather than confined to one site, the festival doubles as a good excuse to explore Yeats country itself — the places around Benbulben, Lough Gill and Knocknarea that thread through the poems.

Almost every event is free of charge, with donations welcomed, which makes it easy to dip in and out of. The full programme is published on the festival website in the run-up to the opening weekend.

This intimate late-August festival centres on St Anne’s Church in Strandhill village, with film screenings in the afternoons and folk performances played from the altar in the evenings — then late-night traditional sessions carrying on down the road in Brees pub. Around the screenings and gigs there are talks, workshops and panel discussions exploring film, music and diversity.

A nice thread in the programme is the “Sense of Place” day, given over to local folklore, literature, nature and biodiversity — well suited to a village sitting between Knocknarea and the Atlantic.

Strandhill is one of Ireland’s best-known surf spots, a short drive from Sligo town, so the festival combines neatly with a weekend by the sea. The 2026 programme is due to launch on the festival website over the summer, with a mix of free and ticketed events promised.

Wild & Well bills itself as a substance-free celebration of community, connection and holistic wellness — a deliberate alternative to the standard festival weekend, set on the grounds of Annaghmore Estate near Collooney. The programme mixes live performances with mindful movement, creative workshops and what the organisers call “sacred play”, spread over three early-September days.

The format suits anyone curious about a different kind of festival weekend: the emphasis is on waking up well and taking part — movement sessions, workshops, music — rather than recovering from the night before.

Collooney sits just south of Sligo town, handy to the N4, which makes the festival an easy add-on to a Sligo or Wild Atlantic Way trip. Tickets are sold through the festival website, and the full 2026 line-up is published there as it is announced.

In September 1588 three ships of the Spanish Armada were wrecked at Streedagh Strand in north Sligo, with the loss of some 1,100 sailors. Each September the village of Grange remembers them with this thoughtful, atmospheric festival, run by Spanish Armada Ireland over four days.

The heart of it is free and out of doors: the annual beach commemoration at Streedagh, a Shipwrecks Walk & Talk identifying where the three vessels came ashore, heritage walks, and a public gathering on the strand to salute the visiting patrol vessel Carnota, accompanied by a flotilla of boats in the bay. An Armada-themed art and photography exhibition — including images of local Armada discoveries from 1985 and 2015 — runs free of charge in Grange Hall throughout.

Around those anchors sit a conference, a gala concert, traditional music sessions and a religious ceremony, some of which are ticketed. Streedagh’s great sweep of beach beneath Benbulben is worth the trip in itself.

Every year on the last weekend of September, Sligo town gives itself over to the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Baroque Music Festival brings together international specialists and local musicians for a concentrated weekend of concerts — a fixture of Ireland’s early-music calendar, and an unusual thing to find in a town of Sligo’s size.

It is an intimate, weekend-scale festival rather than a big production, and with everything happening in and around the town it is easy to fit concerts around Sligo’s pubs and restaurants.

The 2026 line-up had not been announced at the time of writing — the programme and tickets appear on the festival website closer to the date, and its mailing list gets first word.

Sligo Live is the north west’s flagship music festival, filling Sligo town for a fortnight around the October bank holiday with traditional, folk, roots and acoustic music. The bigger names play the Hawk’s Well Theatre, the Knocknarea Arena and The Model, but half the festival’s character lives in the smaller shows — venues, in the organisers’ words, too numerous to list, with music in pubs all over town.

A highlight with real local roots is the Fiddler of Dooney competition, inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem, which draws fiddle players from Ireland and abroad — fitting for a county with its own celebrated style of fiddle playing. Recent editions have also folded in comedy, bluegrass and indie alongside the trad.

The 2026 line-up is announced in stages on the festival website through the autumn — worth booking tickets and accommodation early if you are travelling for it.