Rose Parkinson. She finds you flats, she finds you hotel rooms, she finds you tickets (the second lot - you lost the first). Who is she? You haven't a clue, but you can't live without her.

But you're going to have to, because she isn't the Press Officer of the Galway Arts Festival anymore. And you're going to have to find out who she is, because now she is Artistic Director of the festival.

And the realisation begins to dawn that maybe, perhaps, just sometimes, trying to find you a second batch of tickets wasn't absolutely the highlight of Rose Parkinson's mature years. "Your own humour doesn't come into it at all," she says. "You have to be up all the time." When she got the job of Director last year, she was, she says, "dying to get out of press. Six years is as much as you can do. You're selling something that isn't even yours."

The press work began by accident, or rather, it was one of the chain of accidents which led Rose Parkinson along her career path (accident and Fate being much the same thing from the perspective of the humble human being). "I got a call from Rough Magic to promote a play they were bringing to Galway, I don't even know what it was," she says. "And I said, erra, I would, for the divilment."

She was already promoting the literary events which she ran in her bookshop in the Bridge Mills building, which hangs over the rushing Corrib in Galway. How did she get into the book trade?

"It's a personal story. I was married at the time and I ran it with my husband," she says. How she came to Galway from Dublin, where she was working in finance for Aer Lingus, was, she says, "to do with the self-same husband. We sat down to think what we were going to do and I said, well, ideally, I'd like to move to Galway and run a bookshop." It was the 1980s and Galway was a very different proposition to the city of today, she agrees: "It was all just happening then".

How she first became interested in the arts is a still better example of accident becoming Fate: "When I was working in Aer Lingus I had a friend, and she dragged me down to Listowel Writers' Week. She didn't know whether she wanted to write poetry or plays, so it was literally, toss a coin and see who'll go to what workshop and I was to report to her at the end of the day.

John Montague was doing the poetry and Tom Murphy was doing the drama and I sat in on the Tom Murphy." She takes a deep breath: "The passion that he instilled in me for the arts. I'd never come into contact with him or his work before. It opened up a whole new area to me." IT was an area of which she had grown up in ignorance. "Kilmallock (Co Limerick) is not a great arts community. In my background, the arts weren't a great part of what I was doing." No part at all, in fact? The giggles bubble over. "No part at all, frankly."

Her mother's family was in farming, and her father's family was in the pub trade. He had a shop in the village, called Parkinson's, and her brother had one - "a smaller one" - called "John's".

She went into Aer Lingus "blindly", she says: "It was the permanent, pensionable . . . Sure, my parents were in their element. They were devastated when I left."

They needn't have worried. Once she moved to the arts area of public relations, she quickly became a leader in the field. She worked for four years for the Galway Arts Centre, which included brilliantly promoting the Cuirt Festival of Literature and, for two years, she produced the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival with Richard Cooke. Her promotion of the Galway Arts Festival has been a big part of its success in recent years; and yet she says she never "coveted" the job of Artistic Director and never thought of doing the job herself until Ted Turton announced last year that he was leaving.

She is the first Artistic Director of the festival who was not part of the original "movement" which founded it 23 years ago, and she is the first (officially) full-time Director. She must perform a difficult balancing act between tradition and innovation. "Innovation is more where I'm coming from," she says, but she agrees that having been part of the festival for so long helps her get the tradition right: "I knew what the festival was about and what it wanted to be. Not heavy duty. It's a celebration of the arts, in Galway, nationally and internationally."

On the innovation side, ironically, is a major element of traditional "text-based" theatre, such as Steppenwolf's Sideman and the Irish Repertory of Chicago's Long Day's Journey into Night. On the tradition side are artist Joe Boske and writer and actor Little John Nee, who has never been in the official festival programme before, and the puppeteer, Pat Bracken. The Chilean theatre company's Alice Underground was "vital", she says, to keep up the tradition of visual, physical theatre, but it has something more: "It's theatre of gesture, aerial work, trapeze work, but then it has an extra thing, it's very emotional, something which that kind of theatre doesn't tend to be." One of the judges for this years ESB/Irish Times Theatre Awards, the passion for theatre instilled in her by Tom Murphy all those years ago has certainly lasted.

Theatre is still the main plank of the festival, she says, and she worked on other areas of the programme from that premise to create an event which was as diverse as possible. She is particularly interested in what she calls "interarts stuff", such as Traffic, which will feature Steppenwolf actors Tim Hopper and John Mahoney reading the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to the jazz vocals of the Grammy Award-winning Kurt Elling.

She is being watched, and she knows it: "Audiences in Galway are very critical. They've been dealing with quality for 23 years." She knows, too, that she is now a public figure in Galway and will take blame as well as praise: "That's inevitable, and it's something I've got to live with. Galway is a small place."

But it's a strain. She bucked tradition by not making a speech at the Dublin launch of the festival - what could she add, she reasons, when people had the line-up in front of them? "I just hope", she says, "that the programme will stand up - without people thinking too much about me."