North Texas Irish Festival leaves Fair Park for Denton after 42 years
The North Texas Irish Festival is leaving Fair Park for Denton 42 years after its move to South Dallas.
“One of the largest Irish festivals in the country and one of the largest cultural celebrations in DFW,” as Visit Dallas calls the annual event, is moving to the North Texas Fairgrounds, which occupies 33 acres less than 2 miles from downtown Denton. The deal for next year’s event, to be held March 13-14, was only signed in recent weeks. But organizers told me this week they’ve long been looking elsewhere, and for a variety of reasons.
The move comes 43 years after the North Texas Irish Festival kicked off at a now-defunct Oak Lawn bar, where an expected crowd of 80 turned into 600. A year later, in 1984, the festival, operated by the nonprofit Southwest Celtic Music Association, moved to Fair Park to accommodate crowds that often exceeded 30,000, even in the days just before COVID shut down the world in March 2020.
“We’ve been looking for a different place for several years,” said Sheri Bush, longtime president of the all-volunteer Southwest Celtic Music Association and the festival’s entertainment director. “Fair Park has been our home for a long time, and we loved it, but it became untenable for a number of reasons.”