The Mother’s Arms is a new musical story from one of Galway’s most famous and certainly most unusual performers, Little John Nee. For this show he is joined by the Highly Strung Orchestra and the combination is electric. After a highly successful run in the Earagail Festival in John’s native Donegal, the show plays for the first time in Galway on Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 January at the Town Hall Theatre.

The show is set in The Mother’s Arms Singing Lounge - the previous proprietor has recently been sent to prison and his daughter Rose has returned from a failed marriage in the Florida swamps to run the place, but the banks are circling like vultures. It’s been a long time since there was any singing here. On a beautiful summers’ morning a vintage automobile struggles up the hill, driven by Taxi Mc Dermott founder member of “The Caledonia Highly Strung Orchestra” and there begins a tale...

The Mother’s Arms is a show littered with wonderful moments. There’s a 70 year old woman who describes the details of her recently acquired tattoos. Then there’s Rose, the pub’s landlady, who managed to escape a Deliverance-like fate in Florida. For one scene, two headlights are raised over our host’s head as he takes on the persona of a boy racer. Welcome to Planet Nee!

The Highly Strung Orchestra features Jeremy Howard, Andrew Galvin and Orlaith Gilcreest. The trio play piano, saxophone, clarinet, guitar, bazoukis , petrol cans and more throughout the performance. And cluck like chickens! Surely “Do the Mhatama Gandhi/and let in the light is a contender for lyric of they ear.

On Monday 21 November the Town Hall Theatre will host the Cathy Sharp Dance Ensemble from Switzerland who will present a compilation of three choreographies from their latest repertoire with the overall title of “Step by Step”. The evening includes “scripsi,scriptum”, Cathy Sharp’s new work dealing with the seeming demise of writing by hand. Also on the programme is the dynamic piece “Somewhat Darker”, featuring a new member of the company with a strong local connection: Eoin Mac Donncha from Connemara. The third piece is the humorous ensemble choreography, “Prelude”.

This is the tenth year that the Cathy Sharp Dance Ensemble will perform in Galway. For this occasion, the company will join forces with the Galway’s Chrysalis Dance Company and Youth Ballet West, to present a weekend of dance in the form of workshops, classes, discussions and performance.

Mephisto Theatre Company present Bryan MacMahon’s The Honey Spike at the Town Hall Theatre from the Tuesday 9th to the Saturday 13th August.

The Honey Spike evokes an Ireland of passion, wildness and beauty and tells the tale of Breda Claffey who has her heart set on returning to Kerry, where the 'Honey Spike' – a lucky maternity hospital – is to be found and where her child must be born. But she and her husband Martin are far from home, at the northernmost tip of Ireland and Kerry is a long wearisome distance by cart....

This classic Irish play is a real treat for local audiences this summer. First produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1961 and widely regarded as MacMahon’s best work, the Honey Spike will ignite the Town Hall main stage with a cast including Emmet Byrne, Orlagh De Bhaldraithe, Jerry Fitzgerald, Helen Gregg (of Electric Bridget fame), Daniel Guinnane, Zita Monahan, Seamus O’Donnell and, fresh from her universally praised role as Nuala in the award-winning play ‘Grenades’, Emma O’Grady.

Director Caroline Lynch, who also directed the hugely successful ‘Grenades’, likens the story of the play to that of a contemporary road movie. It’s a journey of endurance lightened by laughter and mischief, including tangles with soldiers at the border, priests in the midlands and feuding clans in Kerry. It shows Irish people as they have always been; putting their faith in God and in magic, with their greatest belief of all in life itself.

Mephisto has been producing work in Galway for over five years, presenting the works of Oscar Wilde, Tom Murphy and Carol Ann Duffy along with devised pieces and new plays. Besides turning out consistently strong and entertaining work at home, the company has also toured the UK and Ireland, and like the characters of The Honey Spike, are no strangers to being on the road. The Honey Spike is Mephisto's most ambitious work to date. The show offers conflict, tradition, song, comedy and beautiful lyricism from the pen of MacMahon.

Galway audiences can look forward to a riveting production from the city’s finest practitioners as Mephisto and associate artists breathe new life into this vintage work.

Once again the Galway Film Fleadh is bucking the receesion trend with strong ticket sales across a range of films.

Two of the Irish premieres, The Guard, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin McDonagh) on Wednesday 6 July and Stella Days, featuring Ireland's favourite American actor, Martin Sheen, on Saturday 9th July are now fully sold out. Other fiilms selling strongly are Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey, a documentary on the Bernadette McAliskey directed by Lelia Doolin, and Unlawful Killing, a documentary on the death of Lady Diana, getting its first public screening since its controversial premiere at the Cannes Festival.

The Film Fleadh kicks off on Tuesday 5 July with the premiere of Parked, a new Irish feature directed by Darragh Byrne and featuring Colm Meaney - and continues with a programme of 30 plus screenings and events each day until Sunday 10 July. Screenings will take place in the Town Hall Main Auditorium, Town Hall Studio, the Cinemobile (parked outside the Theatre) and in the Galway Omniplex - 5 minutes walk from the Theatre.

The Irish Film Institute is embarking on a tour of destinations with a unique film programme, Journey to Aran. This includes the first public showing of a priceless record of Aran Island life, Aran of the Saints (1932), almost eighty years after it was filmed.

Journey to Aran is a special programme of films from the IFI Irish Film Archive that together create a brilliant evocation of island life through the 20th Century, and a truly memorable evening reflecting on the history and traditions of Ireland's most distinctive communities. The tour starts at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway on Wednesday 29th, Thursday 30th June before heading to to Inis Oírr (July 1st) and Inis Mór (July 3rd).

There is particular excitement about the screening of Aran of the Saints. Filmed by the Catholic Film Society of London on Inis Mór and Inis Oírr in 1932, this screening appears, remarkably, to be the Irish premiere. Providing a richly textured counterpoint to the elemental extremes of Flaherty's Man of Aran (made two years later in 1934), the film presents the islands' inhabitants in many of their day-to-day activities: school going, church attending, fishing, farming, weaving and playing tig in the lush green fields.

The silent documentary will be accompanied by a new musical score commissioned by the IFI under the Arts Council Touring Scheme. It will be performed by some of the finest traditional musicians from the Aran Islands: renowned vocalist, MacDara O Chonaola; young harpist Caitríona Ní Almhain; multi-instrumentalist, Mícheál Ó hAlmhain; and fiddle player, traditional music academic, and the project's musical coordinator, Deirdre Ni Chonghaile.

Also in the programme is An tOileanach a d'Fhill (1970), a fictional account by director Jim Mulkerns of the experience of an Irish labourer who returns to Aran after working on a London building site. Featuring an all-islander cast including Micheál Ó Conghaile, Máire de Búrca, Maire Ni Dhioráin and Diarmuid O Goill, this is another cinematic treasure from the IFI Irish Film Archive vaults that has been rarely seen since its intitial release and is presented here in a new digitally restored version. Alongside Aran of the Saints, the film shows not only the changes but also the remarkable endurance of the Island communitites throughout the 20th century.

The programme will also feature a selection of short newsreels and documentaries made on the islands including A Glimpse into the Heart of Eireann (1929) and Radharc: Inisheer (1970).