The films 'Hunger' and 'Wall-E', the Hugh Lane centenary exhibition, Dennis O'Driscoll's interviews with Seamus Heaney and live shows by Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen were among the highlights of 2008 for a selection of arts aficionados

Gráinne Humphreys

Director of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

My caveat is that I have been completely and totally immersed in film all year in terms of putting on the programme for next year's festival. I've been travelling and seeing films all over the place and so, in a way, I have a couple of cultural highlights in film . . . but they're going to be revealed in the programme.

If I had to pick one . . . outside of the festival, it was Wall-E. It's from the Pixar guys who are the genius animation force at the moment. They nearly dictate a level of quality. What I loved about it was that, not only was there fantastic animation - the look and the feel of the film and the ecological message at its core - but this sense of optimism. There wasn't this cynicism, which seems to be filtering through so many arts forms and media at the moment. I watched this film and it made me a kid again.

I went to Turkey for two weeks in August, which was a chance to get a real sense of the country and the culture. I went to see the whirling dervishes in Konya. It was spectacular is all I can say. The symmetry and the balance - it's mesmerising. In a way, because it has an incredible religious and emotional connection with performers and audience, you are caught up in a very particular way with it. You have this sense of mastery and tradition that has been handed down.

A friend of mine, Ann Leahy, launched a book of poems about a month ago, The Woman Who Lived Her Life Backwards. It's fantastic. She has a very wry take on life and subjects that I find you need to have slightly biting wit about . . . I had a great connection with it.

My last highlight is fairly recent: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Abbey. I loved it. You want to see something and go "Wow!" and I thought that Tom Vaughan-Lawlor [as Ui] was fantastic. It was many, many other things - the design was stupendous, and the direction - but it was like watching a star emerge and I think the energy and inventiveness that he brought to this character managed to make you laugh and at the same time inwardly groan or shiver with what was happening.

Fiona Kearney

Director of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork

The one that stands out for me is seeing the Irish premiere of the film Hunger at the Cork Film Festival. The playwright Enda Walsh, who was involved with it, and the actor Liam Cunningham, were there to speak about the work.

The film is an extraordinary work of art from Steve McQueen, who is a trained visual artist. It's very affecting, but also it's structurally incredible, it's almost sculptural in its form. Visually it's really memorable and then there is this core conversation that Enda scripted, right in the middle in this pivotal moment of conflict . . . To have Enda there afterwards and to have that privilege of seeing it in the Opera House . . . is the ideal circumstance to see a film like that.

The other highlight . . . is the representation of Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which was called The Lives of Spaces. It was co-curated by the Architecture Foundation - the director there is Nathalie Weadick - and Hugh Campbell, who is now the new professor of architecture in UCD. Instead of choosing one representation, they featured nine different Irish architect practices, asking each of them to explore what the life of a building means. It was fantastic. To see Ireland perform well in an international context was wonderful. The building Grafton Architects selected was of course the Bocconi University, for which they went on to win that building of the year accolade.

For the first time in a long while I felt the Midsummer Festival in Cork had the whole city in its thrall. We all had this great lift. The whole buzz and feeling with the fantastic branding that was done - it was a very joyous time. There was everything, from that fantastic Spencer Tunick event in Blarney Castle where they persuaded 1,000 people to take off their clothes, to a theatre highlight for me, Corcadorca's The Hairy Ape. All of this under the umbrella of a "festival of the senses"; I felt this was a moment for the city.

Pat Kenny

RTÉ broadcaster

The big cultural highlight for me this year was the re-opening of the Wexford Opera House because we were given the privilege of doing the opening performance. The Late Late Show was a participant as well as a spectator, that has to be the highlight of the year in terms of what was achieved.

As I strolled down the street in Wexford I wondered what they could have done, and what they had fashioned was magnificent. It's completely transformed.

Also, having the final tribute to Ronnie Drew before he died [was a highlight] . . . It was performed live with people such as Bono, Shane McGowan, Sinead O'Connor, Damien Dempsey and, of course, The Dubliners. There was a bit of a party and they all went into the Green Room and had a session. Ronnie himself performed that night.

At the Gate, I enjoyed Hedda Gabler. For me it was a theatrical tour de force. I thought Brian Friel brought a very modern sensibility to it and particularly to the character of Hedda. She is someone who would be recognised in modern . . . Ireland.

[A] thrill for me [was] meeting the music veteran Tony Joe White, who walked into my radio studio . . . He's regarded as the originator of swamp rock. The other person who was a thrill was Seasick Steve, a former hobo who now can sell out the Albert Hall. He has very authentic and honest songs.

Another highlight was all the noise that Des Bishop managed to make through his In the Name of the Fada series and his campaigning for the Irish language. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see what should be blindingly obvious to the rest of us.

Martin Mansergh TD

Minister of State with responsibility for arts and the OPW

The Gate's touring production of Waiting for Godot was first class. I saw that in the Excel Arts Centre in Tipperary, and I thought that was very good. My other nomination in the theatre line would be the Ouroboros production of Making History, on the opening night at the Magill Summer School in Glenties. I also saw Translations in Kilmainham Gaol, both of those were touring productions.

Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur at the Wexford Festival Opera I thought was stunning. The venue, of course, is tremendous. I wouldn't be especially fond, per se, of modern music, but, looking at it in its totality . . . I thought it was stunning.

Also, I attended Rigoletto, just before Bernadette Greevy died and I met her that evening. It was the Anna Livia production. It was a traditional production but it was very good.

I go to the National Concert Hall a lot. Admittedly it's only a stone's throw from OPW, but the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra was tremendous, and also Dame Felicity Lott.

The Hugh Lane centenary, when they got the [Lane Bequest] pictures together [was a highlight].

There are a couple of family portraits at the Hugh Douglas Hamilton exhibition, A Life in Pictures, at the National Gallery. I opened that recently and it's a very interesting exhibition. Hamilton combines both being a society artist and a neoclassical painter. He was operating mainly in Ireland as opposed to abroad.

The final highlight is the Daniel Maclise Exhibition in the Crawford Gallery in Cork.

A couple of foreign exhibitions that caught my eye [were]: the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition in the British Museum and the Marie Antoinette exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris.

Gerard Smyth

Poet and Irish Times journalist

In February Arvo Pärt brought his serene but potent music to RTÉ's Living Music Festival in Dublin, and to Drogheda in collaboration with the Louth Contemporary Music Society. His presence at all events left an indelible impression, and his music - choral, chamber and orchestral - offered a memorable experience.

As with 73-year-old Pärt, it was also case of "old age shall not wither him" when Leonard Cohen came to town to give a series of the classiest performances seen in Dublin for a long, long time and ones that reminded us of the poetic gravity and enduring quality of his work. He also put paid to that silly myth of him as a merchant of "doom and gloom".

The doom and gloom of the August weather was lifted with the return of Tom Waits to provide further evidence that he is a true original in a terrific show that gave his unconventional persona full and free rein.

The debut appearance here of the Berlin Philharmonic, with Sir Simon Rattle on the conductor's podium in the National Concert Hall, was an occasion of musical perfection.

A production of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, in the Staatsoper in Berlin, combined opera and dance in one of the most creative feats of the imagination I have seen on stage, and particularly outstanding was the choreography of Sasha Waltz. Dennis O'Driscoll's interviews with Seamus Heaney, in Stepping Stones, are rich in ancedote, reflection and close-ups that mirror the autobiographical nature of much of the poetry. It not only illuminates the work of this great poet, but sets a new template for how a life can be put on the record. Heaney again showed his mastery at opening the vistas of language in The Burial at Thebes in Patrick Mason's superb Peacock production that paid due respect to the text.

Also in theatre there were bravura performances by Michael Gambon and David Bradley in Pinter's No Man's Land at The Gate, the entire cast in Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Brecht's Arturo Ui in the Abbey. B*Spoke's production of The Sanctuary Lamp reafffirmed why this Tom Murphy play deserves its iconic status, while Brian Friel's Hedda Gabler at The Gate was a spell-binding reinvigoration of Ibsen's classic. And finally Wexford's new opera house is a triumph of design and imagination that took immediate claim to position of crown jewel in our cultural infrastructure.

Vincent Woods

Presenter of The Arts Show on RTÉ Radio 1 and playwright

Highlights include the centenary celebrations at the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery. Looking at the Francis Bacon studio again while reading Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt's fine biography of the man and artist, reinforced the rightness of its location in Ireland. The splendour of Harry Clarke's The Eve of Saint Agnes; the richness of the permanent exhibitions; Fergus Martin's spare, elegant work; the Seán Scully paintings; and the current show, Now's the Time, with extraordinary work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eva Hesse and others: all joys and all there, free as the air. And it was a great year at Imma, too.

Musically, the Sigur Rós album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust has given me immense pleasure this year. The verve, delicacy, daring and playfulness of the Icelandic quartet seem to reinvigorate and challenge both music and language (they invent their own language, "Hopelandic"). Risky and often deeply moving, a rare and rich combination.

Live music highlights include Leonard Cohen in concert, the Tuareg group Tinariwen from Mali, and the great Leitrim fiddle player Brian Rooney in a rare appearance at the Cobblestone in Dublin.

Stepping Stones, Dennis O'Driscoll's book of interviews with Seamus Heaney, is meticulous and measured, a work of deep insight and revelation; it is an invaluable addition to the work of Heaney, an act of memory and creation that puts me in mind of the deep digging into place and identity done by the great American ethnologist and folklorist Henry Glassie. I learnt many new words, my favourite being the "groop" in the byre, a channel for draining cow dung and piss.

Highlights from my own work include a trip to Brazil to hear a reading in Portuguese of

A Cry from Heaven, public interviews for The Arts Show with Seamus Heaney and Dennis O'Driscoll at the Abbey, Tom Murphy on the set of The Sanctuary Lamp in the Samuel Beckett in Trinity, and Michael Billington during the Galway Arts Festival.