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Ireland-Newfoundland festival to go global

By Noreen Bowden | October 8, 2008

The organisers of a festival celebrating the links between southeast Ireland and Newfoundland will begin marketing their festival to the whole world as a way of celebrating the Irish diaspora.

The Festival of the Sea has been running since 2005, and is a joint project between organisers in Waterford, Wexford and Kilkenny and in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Festival co-chair Calvin Manning told The Charter, a Canadian newspaper, that they will be marketing the 2009 festival to places as far away as New York and even Australia:

There are many people in the world that claim Irish ancestry and that is a big market – if we have an international caliber festival celebrating the Ireland-Newfoundland connection, celebrating the history of the Irish diaspora. Scholars claim that nowhere have they retained their Irish features better than in Newfoundland, whether it’s in the face, the name, the dialect, the culture, the music, songs. People who left Ireland and went to places like Australia and New York and Toronto, and assimilated into those places more than we did. The ones that came here kind of got nestled away. They retained their culture. It makes it a stronger link between Ireland and Newfoundland. They feel it and so do we. It blows people away.

See the article on the Charter website.

Related links:

• Festival of the Sea
• The Irish Loop – a tourism initiative in Newfoundland’s heavily Irish Avalon Peninsula.
• Ireland Newfoundland Partnership – promoting business, educational and cultural linkages between Ireland and Newfoundland.

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