Clare McGinn’s take on ‘Hearsay’ – the quirky Irish audio festival that everyone needs to experience.
It is with kind permission from Clare McGinn that The Whickers are delighted to share this very beautifully written Substack piece about her first trip to Hearsay. This soulful, warm hearted and at times, entirely bonkers audio festival which attracts attendees from across the globe, has just come to an end in the Irish village of Kilfinane. Years ago, our Artistic Director, Jane Ray, and Clare bonded through their former media employer’s enthusiasm for sending them both on ‘Inspirational Management’ courses. These inspired little more than a guilty, giggly shuffle to the exit. This piece, by contrast, captures what it truly is to fall in love again with the glorious possibility of creative audio. Enjoy.
HearSay – A Glorious Resurrection by Clare McGinn
I had been hearing about the HearSay Audio Festival for years. For a while the stories and mystery of it belonged to others. Younger colleagues from the BBC production department I ran in Bristol went over to Kilfinane village and came back rejuvenated. They had the shine of the converted about them. They spoke of chapels and pubs and kitchens and extraordinary audio makers appearing in a mountain village in County Limerick as though summoned by bells, weather and tea.
I was never able to go. There were always demands in the shape of work: rotas, budgets, edit schedules, the gentle shackles of ticking off other people’s priorities. So HearSay remained, for me, one of those places you hear about after the fact. Half festival, half rumour and a happening people spoke of with a slightly maddening tenderness.
But this year, free and coming from Belfast, I finally made the pilgrimage.
And pilgrimage is the word.
HearSay 2026 felt like a resurrection. Covid had entombed it. For years it lay dormant, held in memory by those who had been there before but kept the faith. Then, this May, the stone was rolled away. Kilfinane opened its doors again and the audio pilgrims arrived. It is like that famous Field of Dreams quote … “if you build it, they will come”.
And I saw the light.
There’s always a risk in calling anything a religious experience. The phrase has been worn thin by football, wild swimming, good coffee and musos rediscovering vinyl. But HearSay is religious in the older, stranger, more Irish sense of the word. It is serious and daft in the same breath. It comes with ritual, hospitality, hunger, confession, singing, grief, silence, fire, weather and welcome. We met in churches and pubs, hairdressers and sitting rooms. In sunken gardens and water libraries. There was keening. There were choirs. There was a wake. There were meditations and benedictions. There were burgers made from the meat of fatted calves, apples in many incarnations, which gave the whole thing a faintly Edenic air, helped along by sharp showers, birdsong and a crazy sense that perhaps someone, somewhere, had tossed the timetable in the bin and started again.
Kilfinane is not simply the place where HearSay happens. It is an essential ingredient.
The village holds the festival in its walls, its kitchens, its bars, its corners. St Andrew’s old church became an acoustic chamber for grief and beauty. The tennis court became a space for yoga and debate. Local shops including the hairdressers became a sanctuary, which of course it always was. A place where people sit still, look at themselves without quite looking, and let someone else attend to them. What better room for sound? Audio, at its best, is intimate in the same way. It comes close. It alters your sense of yourself without putting a hand on you.
And pubs are still the secular churches of Ireland.
Walking past Kelleher’s, McGrath’s, McCarthy’s and Gallahue’s on the mornings after the nights before, you could see where the formal programme had spilled into the rest of village life. The sessions may have ended, but the thinking hadn’t. A careful idea offered in a chapel or back room had become a story over a pint, then a debate, then a joke, then the sort of sentence that came back to you the next morning while waiting for coffee.
The windowsills, neatly lined with empty pint glasses and bottles from the night before, provided their own archive of proceedings. Alcohol, for all its faults, remains one of Ireland’s more reliable sound engineers. It lowers the levels, opens the faders and occasionally lets someone say the thing they were afraid to say three hours earlier.
The village pub in Ireland is never only a pub. It is shelter, stage, newsroom, court, confessional and parish hall, depending on the hour and the company. At HearSay, the pubs are part of the festival’s unofficial programme: places where makers, pilgrims, locals and wanderers found each other, talked and listened.
At the centre of HearSay is Diarmuid McIntyre, CEO of Grey Heron Media, though the title hardly begins to cover him. He has the charisma of a high priest, a guru, a man operating on some slightly different spiritual frequency from the rest of us, which made it entirely fitting that he was given a set of wings to wear at the opening address. Poetic language seems to pour out of him almost involuntarily: grief and loss in one breath, nourishment, connection and play in the next. He spoke of audio as something living, something breathed and shared, and for once that didn’t sound inflated. He also spoke of grief and loss and ritual. In Kilfinane, with chapels, pubs, hairdressers, gardens and strangers all turned briefly into a congregation, it felt exact. Diarmuid is not merely organising a festival. He is keeping a flame lit, and persuading the rest of us to gather round it.
That is one of its quiet miracles.
Because audio – this most intimate and emotionally charged medium – can become professionalised and depersonalised out of all recognition. Anyone who has worked in paid for radio or podcasting for long enough knows this. The work becomes deadlines, budgets, notes, compliance, platforms, strategy, rights, meetings, and people saying the word “content” so often that the magic of listening is strangled. HearSay brings you back to the fundamentals.
A person.
A sound.
A listener.
A moment held with care.
This weekend in Kilfinane was the perfect reminder that crafting audio is built from attention and not just cleverness, though there was plenty of that. It’s not just technique and technology. It’s about attention, breath, silence and harmony. Attention to the shift in a voice when someone is close to tears or close to laughter. To the creak in a chair, to the bee buzzing outside a window, to the small hesitation that tells you more than any sentence ever will.
In a noisy world, gathering to listen felt almost subversive.
The session I missed – with much regret – was the wake for dead tape which has to be the most Irish and most perfect idea in the whole festival. Makers offered up the fragments of sound they had to cut: beloved bits of audio that had never found their place in the finished work. They honoured them. They played them. They mourned their passing and then they let them go.
Every creator understands this. Every edit is a place of tiny deaths. You cut the lines you love because the piece doesn’t need it. You lose the moments of pure gold because they belong to another story. You kill your darlings, then pretend to be brisk about it because there’s a deadline and somebody needs the final mix.
At HearSay, those losses were memorialised.
There’s wit in that but tenderness too. It recognises that to make anything of value involves small acts of grief and separation that can feel uncomfortable. You hold a private sadness for what you can’t carry forward. And there’s a humility in knowing that the finished work is not yours but for others. Once it’s released it has to become itself.
That thread of grief and separation ran through the weekend. It sounds bleak, but it wasn’t. Or not only. For some people, I’m sure, it touched raw places. Loss, distance, death, memory and the people we can no longer reach are not abstract themes when you’re carrying them in your own body.
But there was something cathartic about hearing those things named so openly. Death and grief are part of life, yet we often treat them as if they’ve arrived from another room and should be ushered quickly back out again. HearSay did the opposite. It made space for them. It allowed sound to do what sound can do so well: hold a voice, catch a breath, carry a song, return us for a moment to someone or something we thought was gone.
What other festival would go that deep, and still leave people laughing outside by a fire?
That is part of its strange power. The living and the lost, the young and the experienced, the local and the international, were all held together for a while. People came from different countries, disciplines and stages of life, but the belief underneath it all was simple enough: sound can shift something in us. It can change a room. It can alter the weather inside a person.
Sound is proof that we are here.
Silence is what makes us understand what has gone.
For as long as I can remember, radio has been a portal to other adventures and dimensions. Growing up in Belfast in the 70’s and 80’s it made me feel safe to hear that comforting voice in the room or a door opening somewhere else. Radio was my way of travelling without moving, of listening in on lives and places and minds beyond my own. That was the original spark for me: curiosity, intimacy, adventure, the strange companionship of a voice carried through the air.
But after more than thirty years working professionally in radio and audio, the charge did dim. Not because I stopped caring. I didn’t. But the work got funnelled through other people’s decisions, other people’s deadlines, other people’s anxieties. The machinery grew heavy. Forms, systems, meetings, budgets and strategy started to drown out the living thing. You can become expert and tired at the same time, which is a dangerous combination. HearSay sliced through that fatigue. It took me back to the beginning and to the wonder of listening properly, and the desire to make something that might open a door for someone else.
There was also something deeply moving about the intergenerational nature of it. Not in a dutiful, worthy way. Younger makers arrived with hunger, invention and nerve. Older makers brought scars, stories, judgement and a few hard-won permissions. Permission to cut. Permission to wait. Permission to trust the listener. Permission to begin again.
Wisdom was passed horizontally instead of vertically.
Nobody owned the mystery.
And that may be why the resurrection metaphor works. HearSay did not come back as a sleeker, shinier, more corporate version of itself. It came back with muddy boots and cups of tea held together by volunteers, goodwill, stubbornness, craft and love.
The gratitude and joy of the returning HearSayers was palpable. Everyone appreciated it because it’s revival was never guaranteed. Festivals disappear. Funding goes. People burn out. Villages change. Since 2019 when the last HearSay gathering the world has become louder, meaner, faster, less able to sit still.
But for one magical weekend in Kilfinane, people stopped to listen as though listening still mattered.
And it does now more than ever.
I came home from HearSay a few days ago with notes, names, ideas and maps to a dangerous number of rabbit holes to explore. I need to rethink Sardinia and the slow heartbreak of indigenous languages lost across generations. The way music can reach grief before words know how to get there. The strange brilliance of live foley sounds making old archive film feel newly alive in front of your eyes.
I meditated on words, incantations and sounds. I sang with strangers who, by the end of the weekend, no longer felt like strangers. I heard stories from people in Kilfinane that will stay with me because they were offered with honesty and trust. I made new friends too, including a woman from Mallow in Cork, a lover of fine art with no professional connection to audio, who had been drawn to HearSay by a piece of writing and then gave herself over to the whole strange enchantment of it. This was so important because she reminded me that this festival is not only for people who know what a fader does but it’s for anyone curious enough to step through the door and open their ears and their heart.
Everyone who turned up in Kilfinane seemed to bring something: a voice, a story, a skill, a song, a question, a bit of hard-won wisdom, or simply acts of small kindness that keeps a weekend like this going.
I have come home lighter than I arrived. While there were profound moments most of it was daft, chaotic and held together by humour, which was intoxicating. That weekend has given me back the pleasure of being curious without needing to turn it straight into output.
After a period of hibernation HearSay returned, but not to how things had been but as a gathering with the memory of absence still inside it and the desire to connect with the world as it is now.
Breath back in the body. Sound in the rooms. People at the doors. Fireside gatherings outside. Voices carrying into the dark.
And that’s what I mean by a resurrection.