Galway's Baboró children's festival stays forever young as it turns 30

This year’s festival runs from October 9-18 and will be attended by schools and families from Galway and beyond. Outside the festival, Baboró runs year-round schemes, including outreach programmes, with artists working with schools and communities in the county and city.

“Schools are a very democratic way of getting to everybody,” says Aislinn, a sentiment that’s echoed by Baboró’s founders Patricia Forde and Jean Parkinson, who steered the organisation through its early years.

It was while working as box office manager of Galway Arts Festival in the early 1980s that Patricia, a primary teacher, realised children needed their own events. Now a successful author, she was always interested in nurturing children’s imaginations.

“I’d see parents coming in booking events for themselves and asking what was on for children,” she recalls.

A few years later, when Patricia became artistic director of the Arts Festival, she began programming for younger people.

Finding children's acts back then was a challenge and Galway was lucky in having Little John Nee, who regularly packed out the Convent of Mercy hall in Newtownsmyth in those early summers, entertaining hundreds of youngsters.

Jean and Patricia also recall the Garda Brass Band performing in 1991, when the city’s fire service made a fire engine available.

“The kids were putting on the siren and going mad,” says Jean laughing.

Then, as now, venues were an issue in Galway. Frequently, kids’ shows were performed on stages that also catered for bigger festival productions.

That wasn’t ideal, Jean recalls. She and Patricia persuaded Festival manager Fergal McGrath and the board to allow them to move Baboró to October, so they could broaden its remit and engage with schools.

At the time, Jean was involved with MacEolas, an educational outreach of Macnas theatre company. This entailed visiting mainland Europe, exploring different approaches to the arts. What she saw was an eye-opener.

“In Denmark, they approached children with such reverence and regard, and that changed our minds about how to approach stuff.”

“The Danish government had a policy that every child would have a free event in school for every year they were in school,” Trish adds.

Children’s theatre did exist in Ireland, but it was largely didactic. Denmark’s was geared at imagination and entertainment.

In Edinburgh, Jean saw the importance of schools for childhood arts. She and Patricia knew that getting schools to attend Baboró would increase inclusivity, so they approached teachers to sell them the merits of the new festival. Rather, Jean did.

“You sent me,” she says to Patricia, laughing.

Jean’s persuasive powers worked and schools from near and came on board.

Some schools were so small they couldn’t afford buses into town, so from an early stage, Baboró subsidised these, and kids attended shows in venues from Nuns’ Island Theatre to the Town Hall and Black Box.

“It was like a military operation. We had to get it right,” says Patricia of managing it all.

They learned on the job, ensuring that buses dropped and collected in a timely fashion, that kids had time and space to eat, and reminding them, before shows, that this was live entertainment, not television.

“It was a real education for the kids because a lot of them had never been to shows before,” says Jean.

Programming Baboró in the pre-internet era was challenging, but with people throughout Europe keeping them in the loop and by visiting other festivals, they brought quality, child-specific work.

Out of that, grew local companies like Branar, which is now a leader in children’s theatre. Likewise Rosán Sensory Adventures which makes shows for children with complex needs and is just back from performing in New York and Sydney.

Baboró continued to flourish. Under the artistic direction of Aislinn’s predecessor Lali Morris, working with general manager, the late Teenagh Cunningham, long-term relationships were established with organisations elsewhere, via EU programmes such as Small Size.

Audiences got younger too, as companies created shows specially for early years.

Patricia and Jean marvel at how Baboró has become inclusive in ways that couldn’t have been dreamed of three decades ago. In the early 1990s, there was limited awareness of catering for children with special sensory needs but now, there are performances for everyone, making life easier for children and parents.

As Baboró launches its 2026 festival programme, Aislinn reflects on developments, including the year-round artistic engagement with schools and communities, creating greater access and equality.

“The festival is still the beating heart of Baboró, but we have other strands, including the outreach programme, securing funding for the arts in education.”

The organisation also has exchange programmes with other European companies, helping emerging artists in a way that reflects contemporary Irish society.

A children’s panel was established in the past five years, involving some 14 children, rural and urban, including from IPAS centres, as they start 4th class. Each panel serves for two years and, as Aislinn explains, “it’s to try and get a handle on what nine- and 10-year-olds want and what interests them”.

Some won’t have been to a theatre previously and they love attending shows and taking part in workshops.

“They realise they can be artists in their own right and can bring their own voices to the fore” Aislinn says.

Baboró is now a leader in children’s arts, happy to share its expertise with others. That happens via a delegates’ conference during the festival, while the Made in Galway strand has resulted in international tours for local companies.

Despite its success, it still doesn’t have a permanent home three decades on, something Patricia, Jean and Aislinn would love to see the powers-that-be in Galway address. Meanwhile, the company remains true to its original mission of entertaining and inspiring children, firing their imaginations and changing their lives.

Full details of the programme at www.baboro.ie.