Patrick MacGill Festival

What to Expect

The Patrick MacGill Festival is a three-day literary and cultural event honouring the writer Patrick MacGill, who was born near Glenties in the late 19th century and left home as a teenage “tattie hoker,” or potato picker, in Scotland before working as a navvy on the roads and railways there and in England. He drew on that experience directly for his best-known novels, “Children of the Dead End” and “The Rat Pit,” which describe poverty and migrant labour with a rawness that was unusual for Irish writing of the period, and he later served as a soldier in the trenches during the First World War, an experience that shaped his later work as well. The festival programme is built around that biography: lectures and literary readings examining his work and its themes of exile and working-class life, guided walks through the Glenties landscape MacGill grew up in and wrote about, and musical entertainment running alongside the more academic strands. Organisers describe the aim as making MacGill’s work accessible to new generations through intergenerational storytelling and collaborative arts, positioning the festival as much a local heritage project as a conventional literary festival.

Good to Know

Dates: Friday, October 23 to Sunday, October 25, 2026, at venues across Glenties. No general ticket price is listed; some events may be free while others, particularly ticketed talks or performances, are expected to carry a charge, so check patrickmacgillfestival.ie for the full programme and costs once published. For questions ahead of that, contact the organisers on +353 831 095 349 or billymaci@icloud.com.

Getting There

Glenties, known in Irish as Na Gleannta, is in west Donegal on the N56, about 30 minutes from Donegal Town and 45 minutes from Letterkenny. As the guided walks are a core part of the programme, comfortable footwear and weather-appropriate clothing are worth bringing given the late-October timing. There is no rail service to Glenties; the town is reached by car or Bus Éireann’s west Donegal routes, with parking available around the town centre.