By Geraldine Comiskey
These scarecrows look like they belong in an Irish horror movie (think: “The Wicker Man” only with Wren Boys).
But the only outing this lot will be getting this year will be to the farmers’ fields, to keep the wild birds away from the crops.
The scarecrows were all set to be the stars of the Scarecrow Festival in the village of Durrow, County Laois, which usually takes place in July/August, but the event has had to be cancelled for the second year in a row due to fears that the pandemic won’t be over by then.
This annual event, in the rural village of Durrow, County Laois, is Ireland’s version of the Burning Man festival, with added political satire.
This summer, they were going to include some very funny effigies of Joe Biden, Trump, Boris Johnson and indeed the Covid. This was to have been the year Joe Biden would have made his debut as a scarecrow, and last year would have been one last outing for the effigies of Donald Trump and Melania. Instead, they languish in a shed – not quite Trump Towers or White House.
Boris Johnson was to have had an ignominious outing too, with Brexit very much part of the planned exhibits.
Even the Covid was expected to make an appearance (albeit in harmless straw-and-cloth form) but unfortunately the real version of the vile virus put a stop to any attempt to satirize it.
American superstar Garth Brooks (or, rather, a scarecrow-effigy of him) popped up at the festival in 2014 – the same year the real Garth bowed out of his Croke Park concert following a massive spat with Dublin City Council over licensing restrictions on the use of the venue (Dublin’s Lord Mayor and even the Mexican Ambassador the got involved in the negotiations, which ended with Garth eventually refusing to play at all). Scarecrow Garth may not have been enough to compensate Real Garth’s disgruntled 400,000 fans – but at least he showed up.
President Micheal D Higgins (or, rather, his straw-lter ego) has made an appearance at the festival every year since 2014. “The real President Higgins was here to canvass during the Presidential election race, and he had to pay €2 to get into the Scarecrow Village like everyone else,” laughed Evelyn Clancy, Chairperson of the Durrow Development Forum.
The event has grown from a tiny village harvest celebration in 2011 to a week-long international festival attracting more than 13,000 visitors the last time it was held, in 2019.
Before the pandemic, the scarecrows used to “escape” from the fields and invade the village of Durrow, where they’d be found in various locations – leaning against doorways, sitting on walls, propped up against lamp posts and lining the roads into the village.
The fun also included live bands playing everything from trad to rock, craft workshops (where visitors could learn to make everything from bath bombs and ceramics to hurleys), a farmers’ market selling home-grown food and an eclectic array of stalls.
The highlight of the week is always the All Ireland Scarecrow Championships – a kind of satirical beauty contest for scarecrows. And competition is fierce, with local boutiques and charity shops teaming up with the amateur craftworkers to dress the scarecrows in style.
The event attracts all sorts of visitors, including young families looking for a way to entertain the kids, nostalgic Generation X-ers stirring up fond memories of watching the TV series Worzel Gummidge in the 80s and old-school-Hollywood buffs who remember the friendly scarecrow from Wizard of Oz.
The festival has spawned a few copycats around the country, but the Durrow folk maintain their scarecrows are the real deal; after all, the village is in the heart of rural Ireland where scarecrows have a real job to do. And entertaining the locals is part of it, according to Bob Campion of Bob’s Bar. “There’s a lot more to being a scarecrow than scaring a few auld crows. They’re expected to earn their keep by bringing visitors into the village and helping us scare away the recession.”
Sadly, they won’t be allowed draw the crowds this year. Durrow Scarecrow Festival Committee issued a terse statement this week: “Like everyone else, we were hugely disappointed when the global pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 festival. We [had] been working hard behind the scenes to make it happen. However, for the safety of all frontline workers, volunteers, artists, traders and visitors, we now know that it’s not possible to make it happen.”
With restrictions on public gatherings likely to be still be in place this summer, this is one of many festivals whose organizers can’t plan ahead. Just up the road, two other festivals, which were cancelled last summer, now hang in the balance as organizers keep a weather eye on the Covid figures and the vaccination roll-out: the annual open-air music festival, Electric Picnic, takes place in the grounds of Stradbally Hall and is like the Irish version of Glastonbury. Meanwhile the Ploughing Championships, which attracted 297,000 visitors in 2019, had to be cancelled last year in neighboring Carlow, but organizers are hopeful that it will go ahead in its old venue, the townland of Ratheniska, next September.
Whatever 2021 holds, all three festivals will be back with a bang in 2022, with the Scarecrow Festival already scheduled to run from Sunday 24 July to Monday 1 August.
And while the scarecrows are under “lockdown” in a shed, the organizers have come up with an inventive way to keep the festival alive: Online Scarecrow Bingo on Saturday nights. Anyone is welcome to play by logging onto https://durrowscarecrowfestival.com/scarecrow-bingo.