Ireland's Edge –– Idir an Dá Linn / Mean Time

Ireland’s Edge, the ideas and discussion strand of Other Voices, returns to Dingle for its 12Th edition on the 27–28 of November, bringing together artists, thinkers, makers, activists and organisers, to reflect, imagine and exchange perspectives at the edge of things.

This year's theme, Idir an Dá Linn - the Irish for ‘in the meantime’ - evokes a space between worlds, between what is passing and what is yet to emerge.

We are living in mean times. Times of profound uncertainty, upheaval and disquiet, suspended between what has been and what is yet to come. A world in flux, where familiar certainties are dissolving and the future feels increasingly unknowable.

Yet the in-between is not only a place of apprehension or waiting. It can also be a place of possibility, imagination and freedom. A space for ambiguity, nuance and contradiction, where new ideas emerge and different ways of thinking and being become possible.

Mean Time also celebrates the ordinary, the everyday, the fleeting moments that make up our lives. While the great dramas of history unfold around us, we continue to find meaning in art, music, friendship, humour and human connection.

At Ireland's Edge, we gather in this space between, to question, imagine, challenge, create and connect. To make room for complexity, uncertainty and wonder. And to consider not only what the future might hold, but how we choose to live, together, in the meantime.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite.

Friday 28 Nov

Doors: 3.30pm | Start: 4.00pm

From the Plough to the Stars: Reimagining Ireland’s Economy

Frances Ruane - Honorary Fellow of Economics, Trinity College Dublin & Former Director, ESRI / Muireann Kelliher - Co-Founder & Curator, Ireland’s Edge (moderator)

Ireland has reinvented itself before. What might we be capable of next—and what might we need to rethink along the way? In conversation with Muireann Kelliher, economist Frances Ruane reflects on Ireland’s transformations, a changing global order in trade and industrial policy, and what economics helps us see—and what it can miss. What looks different with the benefit of experience, and what have we learned to value? An invitation to consider what defines a country, how we understand its progress, and what might yet be possible.

A former director of the ESRI and former chair of the Abbey Theatre, Frances has spent decades at the heart of Ireland’s economic, public and cultural life. Now serving on the boards of IDA Ireland and the Northern Ireland Civil Service, she brings deep expertise in industry and international economics, alongside an unusually broad perspective on a country transformed.

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Cautionary Tales for Curious Times

Lorna Ross - Head of Department, Yeats Academy of Design and Arts (YADA), ATU Sligo

A 30+ year career in design with a particular fascination with understanding the relationship we have with the things we humans build and how they often manifest the best and worst in us. We don’t design for how we are, but how we wish to be. Designing is the invisible profession that has shadowed human progression for the past century, shaping our relationship with technologies and binding us to the tools we use.

Part design anthropology, part tech sceptic, Lorna will immerse us in a set of provocative contradictions that will challenge us to examine how little we understand our relationship with the world we have shaped around us.

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The Bog and the Cloud: Ireland’s Digital Dilemma

Roisin Agnew - Filmmaker & Researcher / Patrick Bresnihan - Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Maynooth University / Carole Cadwalladr - Author & Journalist, The Nerve (moderator)

In partnership with The Nerve.

What happens when technological change outpaces our ability to understand it? From Ireland’s boglands to the global ambitions of Big Tech, this discussion examines the social, environmental and geopolitical stakes of AI and the infrastructure behind it. Can the eco-modern promise of a greener, more prosperous future be fulfilled, or does it perpetuate older patterns of extraction and dependence?

Has Ireland struck a Faustian pact with Big Tech, and what might we be trading for investment and growth? The involvement of major technology companies in surveillance and warfare raises urgent questions about who we do business with and the wider consequences of those relationships. Does our economic dependence compromise our political independence, or our ability to act on our stated commitments to human rights? What responsibilities come with Ireland’s place in this global digital economy?

Hosted by Carole Cadwalladr of The Nerve, this conversation explores who benefits, who bears the costs, and who informs the choices ahead. It also asks how artists, philosophers, designers and ethicists can help place human and ecological concerns at the heart of technological change.

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 “Choose Life”: In Conversation with Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh - Author / Christopher Kissane - Writer, Historian & Host

Over more than three decades, Irvine Welsh’s writing has had enormous cultural reach and influence, most famously his 1993 novel Trainspotting, adapted into Danny Boyle’s iconic 1996 film starring Ewan McGregor. Many of Welsh’s subsequent bestselling novels have also been adapted for film, and he has written TV dramas for BBC, ITV, and Channel 4. 

Alongside this literary career has come a number of musical endeavours, including singles with Primal Scream and Arthur Baker and most recently a role as founder and manager of record label, Jack Said What. 

Welsh has a strong connection to Ireland having visited family and friends here since he was a child. This is particularly true of Ireland's leftwing political heritage, with a biopic of famous Hibs fan and long-time inspiration James Connolly in the works and having spoken out on causes with deep relevance on this island most recently in defence of Sally Rooney and her stand for Palestinian rights.

Originally from Edinburgh, he now spends much of his time in the United States, and his latest novel Can Nothing Save Us? explores the dark decay of the American soul. 

Saturday 29 Nov

Doors: 12.30pm | Start: 1.00pm

Waste Not, Want Not: All About Business Live with Iseult Ward

Iseult Ward - Co-Founder & CEO, FoodCloud / James Reed - Chairman & Chief Executive of Reed (moderator)

In Ireland, almost one in three parents surveyed by Barnardos say they've experienced a time when they didn't have enough food to feed their children. Yet enormous quantities of perfectly good food continue to go to waste. It's a contradiction that Iseult Ward has spent more than a decade working to address. Since 2013, FoodCloud, the award-winning social enterprise she co-founded, has used technology to connect businesses with surplus food to the communities that need it most, redistributing the equivalent of more than 493 million meals and supporting over 7,000 charities in Ireland and internationally.

While studying Business and Economics at Trinity College Dublin, Iseult envisaged a future in finance, but was impelled by a growing sense of social purpose to take a different path. In a special live recording of All About Business, James Reed sits down with Iseult, whose family roots are in West Kerry, to explore how a simple idea grew into an international operation. From the decisions, setbacks and breakthroughs along the way to the challenges of building an organisation whose success is measured not just in financial terms, but in its impact on people, communities and the planet, this is a conversation about ambition, ingenuity and what it takes to turn an idea into lasting change.

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Staying Power: Community, Enterprise and the Power of the Collective

Seán McCabe - Head of Climate Justice at Bohemian Football Club / Pat F. Hennessy - Senior Marine & Fisheries Advisor / Shirley Walsh - CEO, Shannon Coiled Springs & Chairperson, Emerald Aero Group / Muireann Kelliher - Co-Founder & Curator, Ireland’s Edge (moderator)

What links high-precision aerospace manufacturing, coastal fishing fleets, and a supporter-owned football club?

Whether vying for lucrative global supply deals, steering coastal enterprises through energy transitions, or driving civic transformation beyond the stadium, these distinct sectors are redefining traditional models of commerce, authority, and value distribution.

Shirley Walsh, head of Shannon Coiled Springs and chairing Emerald Aero Group, unites domestic enterprises to capture overseas ventures that lie outside individual capabilities. Pat F. Hennessy assists maritime regions adapting to volatile markets and emerging marine turbines. At fan-owned Bohemian FC, Seán McCabe examines how sports institutions can serve as engines for grassroots innovation, democratic stewardship, and regional vitality.

Alongside moderator Muireann Kelliher, this panel examines the transformative impact when distinct groups unite to tackle systemic hurdles. Can cooperative enterprise unlock possibilities that typically stay out of reach, grant grassroots initiatives real autonomy, and distribute the economic value back to those who generated it?

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Mother Tongue: Losing, Finding and Reclaiming Language

Sophia Smith Galer - Journalist, Author & Content Creator / Rob MacNeacail - Sound Designer & Musician / Gwenno - Musician, Songwriter & Producer / Billy Mag Fhloinn - Folklorist, Archaeologist & Lecturer (moderator)

Current estimates suggest that 50 per cent of the world’s languages will no longer be spoken by this century’s end - an outcome author and language activist Sophia Smith Galer describes as a “mass extinction event”.

Her recently published How to Kill a Language is a compelling investigation into a hidden global crisis affecting thousands of languages worldwide, including minority languages in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

All three guests on this panel are working to keep languages and the cultures they carry alive.

Musician, singer and sound designer Rob MacNeacail, a speaker of Scottish Gaelic, is reconnecting the Gaelic psalm singing of the Hebrides with singers and communities across Scotland and beyond. Through singing together, participants find opportunities to use and learn Scottish Gaelic.

Cornish Welsh singer Gwenno grew up in a trilingual family with a Cornish-speaking father and Welsh-speaking mother, and has recorded in Cornish, Welsh and English. Her language activism focuses particularly on Cornish, which UNESCO reclassified from “extinct” to “critically endangered” in 2010, recognising the language’s revival.

Together, they explore how language sustains cultural continuity and a sense of place, community and creativity.

Folklorist and archaeologist Billy Mag Fhloinn, creator of The Pagan Rave, which memorably featured at Ireland’s Edge in 2021, will lead what promises to be a cracker of a discussion.

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Whatever You Say...

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC - Human Rights Lawyer / Malachy Browne - Journalist, The New York Times / Paul Caruana Galizia - Author & Investigative Reporter, Financial Times / Christopher Kissane - Writer, Historian & Host (moderator)

2025 was the deadliest year for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists started recording reporters’ deaths. The detention, silencing, intimidation, and murder of investigative journalists pose a direct threat to those who hold power to account. In an age of disinformation, surveillance, and impunity, how can we protect the people who report on what corporations, criminals, and governments want to keep hidden?

Joining us at this critical moment are three unique and potent voices who have seen the power of and corresponding threat to press freedom throughout their personal and professional lives. 

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is one of the world’s leading  international human rights lawyers and has acted in some of the most consequential civil and human rights cases of the last 25 years. After 20 years at Doughty Street Chambers in London, she has recently returned to Ireland to devote more time to her international and Irish work as well as to strategic campaigning on rights-based issues.

Joining her are two journalists whose work has shed light on crimes and injustices around the world. 

Malachy Browne is a Pulitzer-winning journalist at The New York Times. His groundbreaking use of digital and visual evidence to investigate conflict, human rights abuses and questionable government denials has been cited in U.S. congressional hearings, U.N. Security Council meetings and murder trials, exposing crimes from chemical weapons attacks, to police violence and mass shootings.

Paul Caruana Galizia is an award-winning investigative reporter at the Financial Times whose work has exposed crime and corruption on the global stage. He became a journalist in 2018 after his mother Daphne’s assassination. Centred on his mother’s death and his family’s quest for justice, his book, A Death in Malta, was named one of The Times’ top ten true-crime books of all time.

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Aisling Bea & Special Guest

Aisling Bea - Actress, Comedian & Writer & MYSTERY SPECIAL GUEST

Aisling Bea requires little introduction. An actor-writer-comedian triple-threat, she has been a torchbearer for all things clever, funny and Irish at home and abroad for quite some time now. Aisling comes to Ireland’s Edge with a song in her heart and an extremely special guest in her back pocket. Need we say more? Well, we can’t actually say more, but we really wouldn’t miss this one if we were you.

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Courtesy of our venue partner the Dingle Skellig Hotel, a specially prepared three-course lunch will be available to all Saturday attendees in the hotel’s Coastguard Restaurant.

Ireland’s Edge – Idir an Dá Linn / Mean Time is supported by Reed, and Venue Partner The Dingle Skellig Hotel.