The rockin’ road to Dublin
IQ visits the Emerald Isle to detail the perennial success of the live music business in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland
Feature By IQ | 1 July 2025
Lockdown had many strange consequences, but Ireland experienced one that nobody predicted: the kids got into trad.
“It’s weird, you know,” says Mark Downing at Bray, County Wicklow-based booking agency AMA Music, who identifies lockdown scrolling as the reason for traditional Irish music’s re-emergence as a heavy influence on all sorts of new homegrown sounds. “It happened during Covid, without question. It wasn’t there beforehand.”
Irish rock and pop music has, of course, been a major export…
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