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A newly conferred graduate of ��ɫ��Ƶ will soon embark on a touring exhibition across the country inspired by his research on Ireland’s anti-nuclear festivals.

Caimin Walsh, who was conferred with a Master’s in Ethnomusicology from UL’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, was one of over 2,000 students to graduate ��ɫ��Ƶ’s Winter Conferring Ceremonies.

A firm believer in the power of art to encourage and facilitate social good, the Caherdavin native is steeped in the Limerick arts scene as a curator of contemporary art at Limerick’s Ormston House where he develops arts projects, events and exhibitions with artists and musicians. 

Ormston House’s upcoming exhibition, Memory of a Free Festival, centres on Ireland’s Anti-Nuclear Movement (1978-1981) and the music festivals that helped to mobilise communities against nuclear power, a topic Caimin explored extensively for his MA thesis. 

The exhibition will feature reproductions of items held in UL’s Special Collections, which Caimin drew on for his MA research. 

As a musician himself, Caimin was intrigued to understand what role music has in society and how it can bring people together to critique power structures and provide alternative forms of insight into complex issues. 

Caimin’s curiosity led him to UL where he embarked on the MA in Ethnomusicology, a course that explores music in its social and cultural contexts, asking how and why people make music, and why that matters.

It was while he was curating a project at Ormston House on the role of music and Irish political history that he came across Songs of Social Protest, a collection of essays exploring the role of song within various protest movements, edited by UL academics Dr Aileen Dillane, course director of UL’s MA in Ethnomusicology, Dr Martin Power, Professor Eoin Devereux and Professor Amanda Haynes. 

“It was my first time engaging with writings on music from ethnomusicologists and sociologists. I loved it, and I pretty much read the book cover to cover. 

“It took another couple of years after that, but I knew if I had the time and a space in my career to do so, I wanted to study ethnomusicology in UL.”

A regular festivalgoer, both as a punter and performer as well as a festival organiser, Caimin was intrigued to understand the potential of the festival format as a vehicle for political action. 

He chose to focus his MA research on how anti-nuclear festivals held between 1978 and 1981 at Carnsore Point in Co. Wexford, on the proposed site of Ireland’s first nuclear power station, played a significant role in mobilising communities to oppose nuclear development in Ireland.

The festivals, one of which was dubbed as ‘Ireland’s Woodstock’, featured some of Ireland’s most loved musicians including Christy Moore, Clannad, Donál Lunny, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and Andy Irvine, as well as prominent political figures such as the founding member of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly.

Caimin said: “Ireland’s anti-nuclear festivals sought to appeal to people through the strategic use of music. They were a means of bringing people together – to build a national movement of autonomous groups that would go on to campaign in their respective localities in the aftermath of the festivals.

“The joining together of a mass political protest within the framework of a music festival was unprecedented in Ireland at the time, and I struggle to think of another event since that is like it.

“The anti-nuclear festivals show us how using music as a means to communicate political messaging can resonate with people more deeply beyond the delivery of statistics and scientific data. 

“The music brought people together and created the conditions for social bonding, and in tremendous numbers. It helped entice people into anti-nuclear campaigns, sustain involvement and inform public opinion through the affective messaging of song.”

The Simon Dalby Papers housed in UL’s Special Collections in the Glucksman Library provided Caimin with an extensive repository of newspaper reports, government documents, screen printed festival posters, self-published magazines, leaflets and flyers from the anti-nuclear movement. 

“You have this moment of encounter with these rare documents – perhaps something you’d hope to find or have been reading about for a long time – and it feels very powerful when you see the physical thing in front of you. 

“There is this energy that radiates from this material. These were self-produced materials, put into the hands of people as part of the anti-nuclear campaigns. 

“Some of them probably survived muddy fields, political rallies and smoky pubs and now live quietly within the walls of the UL Library.”

Following on from his research, Caimin has chosen to reproduce some of these items from UL’s Special Collections for Ormston House’s upcoming exhibition, Memory of a Free Festival, which draws on the legacy of Ireland’s anti-nuclear festivals. 

The touring exhibition will be launched at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre on 21 March and will open in Limerick’s Ormston House in mid-April before moving to Wexford Arts Centre in August and Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in early 2027. 

“It’s a unique moment in Irish history and it felt like a rich subject to explore through exhibition making.”

“My Master’s in Ethnomusicology from UL gave me the skills to develop in-depth research, to analyse and interpret the events of the Carnsore anti-nuclear festivals and carry out interviews with organisers and performers. All of this has been vital in informing the content of the exhibition. 

“The exhibition will feature a mix of work by fantastic contemporary Irish artists and presentations of material from UL’s archive, along with never seen before video and photo documentation of the festivals.

“I think the exhibition will appeal to a broad spectrum of people, from those interested in politics, activism and environmentalism to fans of music and contemporary art.”

Further details on Memory of a Free Festival can be found .