Renowned speakers take to stage at Kilkenny Law Festival
The festival is programmed by Naoise Nunn, co-founder and former co-director of Kilkenomics
Distinguished speakers will take to the stage at this year’s Kilkenny Law Festival alongside comedians and industry experts in what promises to be a thought-provoking weekend packed full of fun and new ideas.
The festival runs from September 25 to 27 and brings together leading legal minds, storytelling speakers, and curious thinkers for a celebration of justice, debate, and culture in the heart of Kilkenny.
The programme is deliberately built for three audiences at once.
Legal professionals get sessions with serious weight: former Supreme Court judge Marie Baker, Sir Nicholas Mostyn and Lord Falconer of the Law and Disorder podcast, London commercial barrister Gerard Clarke on where the world's billion-euro disputes choose their venue, and ITN's Head of Legal John Battle on the stories the lawyers killed. Law students get a dedicated Friday morning on what the job is really like, priced at €10. And anyone with a pulse and some curiosity gets true crime, crime fiction, live podcasts, a documentary screening and a walking tour of the city's most notorious trials.
Highlights include: Law and Disorder, live and without precedent (Friday, Watergate Theatre): the hit UK legal podcast's first live Irish outing, with a former High Court judge and a former Lord Chancellor and former Supreme Court judge Marie Baker asking why no one took a writ of habeas corpus to release incarcerated women in the Magdalene laundries.
Other highlights include: - Judge Versus Chatbot (Friday, Kilkenny Courthouse): an AI reads the evidence in a real case and a real judge marks its homework.
- Crime World Live with Nicola Tallant (Saturday, Ormonde Hotel): Ireland's biggest crime podcast on stage, with two decades of gangland reporting behind it.
- The State v. Haughey (Saturday, Home Rule Club): the 1970 Arms Trial reopened by barrister and author David Burke and former Special Branch head Peter Maguire, who was a serving Garda at the time.
- Getting Away with Murder (Saturday, Club House Hotel): crime novelists Jane Casey, Andrea Carter and Sinead Crowley on the uneasy relationship between the murders they invent and the ones in the news.
- First Conviction (Saturday, Home Rule Club): the teams behind RTÉ Doc on One and RTÉ Investigates take an Irish miscarriage of justice apart, live, step by step.
- Witches, Rebels and Hanging Judges (Saturday and Sunday, from Kilkenny Courthouse): a walking tour of seven centuries of Kilkenny justice, from Alice Kyteler to the gallows.
- Crime Doesn't Pay (Sunday, Set Theatre): how the Criminal Assets Bureau takes the gangsters' money, from the man who was its first legal officer.
- One Farmer v. The State (Sunday, Cleere's): a screening of The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, the story of one Kildare farmer's refusal to sell, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Luke McManus.
The festival is programmed by Naoise Nunn, co-founder and former co-director of Kilkenomics.
Tickets range from €10 to €34 and are on sale now at www.kilkennylawfestival.com