Kilkenny Law Festival puts the Law on Trial, 25–27th September
Kilkenny, the city that tried Alice Kyteler for witchcraft in 1324 and burned her maid in her place, is about to give the law another going-over. The second Kilkenny Law Festival runs from Friday 25th to Sunday 27th September, with 25 events across nine venues in the city, and its organisers are clear about one thing: you don't need a law degree to get in.
The festival is programmed by Naoise Nunn, co-founder and former co-director of Kilkenomics, the festival that turned economics from a subject people avoided into a weekend people queue for. Kilkenny Law Festival sets out to do the same for the law. It puts barristers, judges, journalists, forensic experts, novelists, podcasters and a court artist on stages in pubs, hotels, theatres and a working courtroom, and asks them to explain how the system actually works, where it breaks, and who pays when it does.
"Everybody has an opinion on economics but almost nobody understands it. That was the gap Kilkenomics filled," said Naoise Nunn. "The law is worse. It decides who goes to prison, who gets deported, who keeps their house, whether the story about the politician gets printed. It shapes your life whether or not it works for you. And yet most people only meet it in a crisis, through a solicitor's letter or a court summons or a headline. We want to open the courtroom doors for a weekend and let everyone in."
The programme is deliberately built for three audiences at once. Legal professionals get sessions with serious weight: former Supreme Court judge Marie Baker, Sir Nicholas Mostyn and Lord Falconer of the Law and Disorder podcast, London commercial barrister Gerard Clarke on where the world's billion-euro disputes choose their venue, and ITN's Head of Legal John Battle on the stories the lawyers killed. Law students get a dedicated Friday morning on what the job is really like, priced at €10. And anyone with a pulse and some curiosity gets true crime, crime fiction, live podcasts, a documentary screening and a walking tour of the city's most notorious trials.
Highlights include:
Law and Disorder, live and without precedent (Friday, Watergate Theatre): the hit UK legal podcast's first live Irish outing, with a former High Court judge and a former Lord Chancellor and former Supreme Court judge Marie Baker asking why no one took a writ of habeas corpus to release incarcerated women in the Magdalene laundries.
Judge Versus Chatbot (Friday, Kilkenny Courthouse): in Courtroom No. 3, an AI reads the evidence in a real case and a real judge marks its homework.
Crime World Live with Nicola Tallant (Saturday, Ormonde Hotel): Ireland's biggest crime podcast on stage, with two decades of gangland reporting behind it.
The State v. Haughey (Saturday, Home Rule Club): the 1970 Arms Trial reopened by barrister and author David Burke and former Special Branch head Peter Maguire, who was a serving Garda at the time.
Getting Away with Murder (Saturday, Club House Hotel): crime novelists Jane Casey, Andrea Carter and Sinead Crowley on the uneasy relationship between the murders they invent and the ones in the news.
First Conviction (Saturday, Home Rule Club): the teams behind RTÉ Doc on One and RTÉ Investigates take an Irish miscarriage of justice apart, live, step by step.
Witches, Rebels and Hanging Judges (Saturday and Sunday, from Kilkenny Courthouse): a walking tour of seven centuries of Kilkenny justice, from Alice Kyteler to the gallows.
Crime Doesn't Pay (Sunday, Set Theatre): how the Criminal Assets Bureau takes the gangsters' money, from the man who was its first legal officer.
One Farmer v. The State (Sunday, Cleere's): a screening of The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, the story of one Kildare farmer's refusal to sell, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Luke McManus.
Other sessions take on the gig economy, asylum and the immigration backlog, burnout and the billable hour, Ireland's defamation laws and the stories that never get printed, junk science in the witness box, and whether the gay rights revolution is over.
Comedians Colm O'Regan and Aideen McQueen host throughout, including a Sunday brunch where the weekend's newspapers are cross-examined by a panel of lawyers over a plate of food.
"This is not a legal conference and it's not a trade fair," Nunn said. "It's a festival about justice, power and what happens to ordinary people when the two collide - all of it is in plain English."
Tickets range from €10 to €34 and are on sale now at www.kilkennylawfestival.com
Slán go fóill
