All Together Now Festival

All Together Now Festival has a quality many festivals chase and few truly achieve: it feels large without becoming impersonal. At Curraghmore Estate in County Waterford, the festival uses a historic Irish estate as a parallel world, one where music is not separated from landscape, food, art, conversations, comedy, wellness and the feeling of escaping for a few days without losing contact with a real community. Its name is not just a pleasant phrase. It captures much of what the festival tries to do: bring different audiences together under one atmosphere of discovery.

Since its first edition in 2018, All Together Now has built itself as a more adult, curious and sensory alternative within the Irish festival calendar. It is not a festival that depends only on placing enormous names in large type, although it has them. Its strength lies in how it mixes legendary artists, cult figures, dance electronics, contemporary Irish music, folk voices, post-punk, jazz, reggae, spoken word, alternative pop, food, talks and family experiences. More than a list of concerts, it feels like a weekend programme designed for movement, wandering and surprise.

The setting is essential. Curraghmore Estate is not a neutral site. It is a vast, green estate with history, gardens, paths, trees, old architecture and a scale that allows the festival to breathe. In a place like that, music changes temperature. An electronic set feels different after walking through trees; a folk song lands differently when the landscape seems to answer it; a talk, a meal or a wellness area stops feeling like an “extra” and becomes part of the journey. All Together Now understands that a boutique festival is not only programmed. It is inhabited.

The 2026 edition shows the festival’s DNA very clearly. Pulp brings Britpop memory, crooked elegance and a very particular relationship with audiences who understand music as generational storytelling. Kneecap brings a completely different Irish energy: political, linguistic, hip hop-driven, irreverent, chaotic and culturally current. Disclosure, Underworld, Floating Points, Mall Grab, Joy Orbison, Job Jobse, Annie Mac and Kerri Chandler hold up the festival’s electronic column, from house and garage to rave, club culture and deeper textures. At the same time, Christy Moore, The Mary Wallopers, Damien Dempsey, For Those I Love, Soda Blonde, Sprints, Gurriers and Gilla Band connect with different layers of Irish identity, from tradition to urban noise.

That coexistence is what makes All Together Now special. In the same weekend, the crowd can include people arriving for Pulp, for Underworld, for Christy Moore, for Kneecap, for Ezra Collective’s jazz, for Barrington Levy’s reggae, for Self Esteem’s art-pop, for Kae Tempest’s poetic intensity or simply to discover twenty artists they did not have on their radar. The festival does not force one tribe. Instead, it builds a conversation between scenes: old political song and late-night electronics, folk-punk and house, post-rock and spoken word, family life during the day and dancefloor energy at night.

Its commitment to Irish talent also matters. All Together Now does not treat the local scene as decorative filler. In recent lineups and again in 2026, Irish presence is strong, visible and placed in important parts of the programme. That gives the festival an identity that could not simply be moved to another country without changing shape. Even when international names arrive, its pulse remains Irish: in the singing, the humour, the oral tradition, the mix of melancholy and celebration, the community sense and the way Irish music can move from a whisper to a collective roar.

The real All Together Now experience probably feels less like chasing headliners and more like building a personal drift. You might begin the day with carefully chosen food, pass through a Curious Minds conversation, stumble into an unexpected set, see comedy, rest in a green space, hear a songwriter in the afternoon, dance to electronics after dark and end up talking to strangers as if you already knew them. That rhythm, more than the lineup alone, is what makes a festival memorable.

All Together Now matters because it represents a mature version of the contemporary festival. It does not give up on powerful lineups, but it does not reduce everything to the lineup either. It understands that audiences want music, yes, but also landscape, care, discovery, taste, community and the feeling of a complete weekend. Its strongest image is not only a headliner in front of thousands of people, but Curraghmore lit up for a few days: stages among trees, Irish voices crossing paths with global electronics, families walking by day, bodies dancing by night and the certainty that, when a festival is well curated, everything can feel united without becoming uniform.