Patrick Kavanagh Weekend 2026

Kavanagh Weekend returns to Inniskeen from Friday, 25 September to Sunday, 27 September 2026, the Patrick Kavanagh Centre’s annual celebration of the poet who grew up on these fields and wrote them into Irish literature. For 2026 the curatorial team Unreal Cities, led by actor and director Adrian Dunbar and composer Nick Roth, has shaped a programme exploring Kavanagh’s connection to the Beat Generation, timed to the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. The weekend opens with the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and a festival keynote on the Friday night.

What to expect

On Friday night the Poetry Award is presented for an unpublished collection in English, followed by a session on Kavanagh and the Beats built around Jack Kerouac’s “The Beginning of Bop”. Saturday’s headline event brings comedian Tommy Tiernan into conversation with the poet Anne Waldman, a key figure of the Beat movement, alongside Dunbar and Roth, in what the Centre bills as a wide-ranging talk on poetry, performance and artistic freedom. The wider weekend, run in association with the Patrick Kavanagh Society, mixes lectures and readings with the informal pleasures the poet himself wrote about: guided tours around Inniskeen and the fields of Kavanagh’s poems, music sessions, and set dancing. Past guests at Kavanagh Weekend have included leading Irish poets and academics, and the festival draws visitors from Ireland and abroad who come as much for the place, the “stony grey soil” of the poems, as for the programme itself.

Getting there

Inniskeen is signposted off the R178 between Carrickmacross and Dundalk, about 10km from Carrickmacross and 15km from Dundalk. There is no rail or scheduled bus service directly into the village, so a car is the practical option; parking is available around the Patrick Kavanagh Centre itself, which sits in the middle of the village beside the old church where the poet is buried.

While you’re in Inniskeen

Inniskeen is a small village built almost entirely around its connection to Kavanagh, from the Centre itself to the fields and lanes described in his poems. There is more to see in Inniskeen and across Co. Monaghan, including the wider Kavanagh Country walking routes that loop out from the village into the surrounding drumlin farmland.

Good to know

• Date: Friday, 25 September to Sunday, 27 September 2026
• Venue: Patrick Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan
• Price: individual events are ticketed separately; the Tommy Tiernan and Anne Waldman conversation is €35 (see separate listing)
• Recurrence: annual, held every September
• Booking: patrickkavanaghcentre.com or the Centre’s box office