Organisers pull the plug on Galway Food Festival
Galway City Tribune - Organisers have pulled the plug on this year’s Galway Food Festival due to the lack of funding.
The festival has taken place over Easter since 2012 and last year attracted 70,000 food enthusiasts, many of them families from around the country, marking the beginning of a longer tourist season.
But with some restaurants and food producers yet to hand over their fees from last year and little by way of public grants or sponsorship likely to emerge to help meet the €100,000 costs, it just became a bridge too far for the committee of volunteers.
“Principally it’s funding – we don’t have the budget to hire employees in time. Everything is last minute,” explained chairperson JP McMahon.
“We’d have a few people working from January and February when the thing is on in April and really we’d need to have three part-time people working on running events and getting sponsorship from October. We just feel like we have to take stock.”
In 2017 it posted a loss of €15,000, which was covered by the directors, including JP, the owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Aniar.
They decided to go ahead with it anyway for 2018 given the importance of staging the weekend-long event when Galway was European Region of Gastronomy.
“Last year we just about made it,” he admitted when asked about the finances. This is a preview only. To read the rest more from JP McMahon on the Food Festival, see this week's Galway City Tribune. Buy a digital edition of this week's paper here.
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