Arts & Culture

As the countdown to the fourth annual Tulla Trad Festival gets underway, a callout for accommodation has been sounded amid the expectation of large numbers to this year’s event. Tulla Trad festival runs from Friday-Sunday, September 10-12, and Tulla Comhaltas have issued a call out to residents in the area who would be interested in providing bed and breakfast for visitors over the weekend.A spokesperson for the group said, “this year we expect to have large numbers travelling to Tulla for the festival and we have a number of host families who have done this over the last few years but we are looking for a few more.” Anyone interested is asked to contact Brid Murphy on 086 1522169. According to Tulla Comhaltas, places for the music workshops are already starting to fill up and those interested in booking their place are asked to do so as soon as possible. The workshops will be held with Ged Foley offering classes …

Salt DIRECTED BY: Phillip Noyce STARRING: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor CERT: 12A Occasionally while watching Salt, I would think to myself: “When those real-life Russian spies were rounded up recently in the US, why didn’t they run around busting heads like Angelina, instead of meekly surrendering and being sent home to the Motherland with big embarrassed heads on them?”Other than that I enjoyed the film immensely.The lovely Angelina stars as Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent who gets landed with interrogating a defector and, after going to the bother of staying on late at work when she should be heading off to meet the husband for a date, she ends up getting herself accused of being a Russian spy. Well, that doesn’t go down too well with the lads in the office and they shut the place down tight to have a little chat with her. But she’s not having any of that, so she puts her MacGyver box …

FOUR years ago we lived in a country where the building business was booming and it seemed like every green field in the country was being eradicated by the pouring of concrete. The number of one-off houses being built was relatively small, however, with the big money being made on the backs of housing schemes, estates or other developments.Call them what you will, most were soul-less cardboard complexes thrown up by building companies that were bathing in euro-filled baths each evening. We have come a long way since then and the journey for house owners has not been a pleasant one. While most of us settled to buy what was, at the time, a reasonably-priced cardboard box, a few brave souls went the route that most of us only dream of (mainly because getting planning permission is as likely as going to the moon for most of us) – building their own dream house.Grand Designs is a wonderful Channel 4 …

`Centurion is the latest quality slice of low budget action from Dog Soldiers and Doomsday mastermind Neil Marshall with the director turning his eye towards a bit of sword and sandle chicanery in Roman-occupied Britian.

A young North Clare man has outshone thousands of hopefuls to make it to the semi-final of the Sky 1 series Must be the Music. Daithí Ó Drónaí from Ballyvaughan will be familiar to many people after reaching to the final of the All-Ireland Talent Show last year. Last weekend however, Daithí made it to the final 15 of the Sky 1 show after being endorsed by all three judges in the competition – rapper Dizzee Rascal, Ivor Novello winner Sharleen Spiteri and Britain’s biggest-selling jazz artist, Jamie Cullum. Daithí is competing for a prize of £100,000 and the opportunity to perform at Wembley Arena. “I haven’t even thought that far ahead,” Daithí told The Clare Champion. “My aim is to live comfortably off music so that I wouldn’t have to work anywhere else and the £100,000 would be a good start,” he added.  Music is in Daithí’s family. His brother plays the flute, his grandfather is well-known concertina player …

A WEST Clare photographer and gallery owner has come up with a novel idea to challenge artists to complete 12 works in 12 hours in six different media.Katrina Morrison of the Buttermarket Gallery in Kilrush and the Kilkee Marine Gallery is organising the West Clare Art Challenge to take place on Thursday, September 2. She explained the idea stemmed from a conversation she had with one of the artists who is currently exhibiting in the gallery, James Hally. “James is a sketch artist and works mainly with graphite pencil. He suggested that we run a challenge getting artists to do 12 works in 12 hours in 12 different mediums. “We put the idea to Cillian, an art student from the Limerick School of Art and Design who is doing an internship in the gallery and he loved the idea. I then had a chat with my son-in-law, Mark Kelly, who is also an artist, about it and he felt the …

It has been announced that Mountshannon is to host a second festival, this time one dedicated to traditional music.

THE Wild Swan Theatre Company of Gort have returned after yet another sell-out show of their hugely popular farcical play A Wake In the West, by Michael Joe Ginnelly. This time, the show hits the motorway all the way to the Cultúrlann Centre on Belfast’s Falls Road, as part of the local Féile Phobail.