The team behind St Patrick's Festival have been putting their experience to good use elsewhere, writes Shane Hegarty.

'It's a little busy," says Dominic Campbell with a distinct air of understatement. As artistic director of St Patrick's Festival he is responsible for much of the planning and creative outcome of the week-long event. But this year he and much of his team at the company are also involved in other people's events. In May they will organise the Day of Welcomes on behalf of the Government's artistic and cultural programme for the EU presidency. They will manage both the Dublin Elevations interactive art project that leads up to May 1st and the events spread across 10 towns on the day itself. It will be the equivalent, says Campbell, of 10 arts festivals on the same day.

It doesn't end there. On June 13th Dubliners will be treated to a Bloomsday breakfast on O'Connell Street, with up to 10,000 people chowing down on offal. St Patrick's Festival will be responsible for making it run smoothly - as it will be on June 19th, when the banks of the Liffey will be the site for light shows, water fountains and music to celebrate the centenary of the day chronicled in Ulysses.

"No way would we have dreamed of doing this three years ago," admits Campbell. It has been a deliberate move by the organisation, however, which has steadily built the kind of expertise necessary to run large events. "We had done other events before, such as the outdoor programme for the Festival of World Cultures, but we had been making the case that because of the skills we have we should be using them more."

For a largely freelance staff it is an opportunity to extend the working year while allowing others to take advantage of the knowledge they have built up in recent years. "When the festival began we had no precedent of large-scale events. But as the event grew there was also a parallel growth in safety legislation and red tape. It became much more complicated, and there is much more experience needed in running these events."

The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, has given more succinct reasons for hiring St Patrick's Festival. "It's important to remember that the Irish have a reputation for being the best at throwing a party, so it was important that we had the best administration expertise available," he told The Irish Times in January.

The working relationships between St Patrick's Festival and its clients depend on each organisation. "It's collaborative. They hand it over to us, but it is still their event," says Campbell. The James Joyce festival, which is known as ReJoyce 2004, wanted a mass-participation event with a quirky edge; that meant it had different demands from the countrywide Day of Welcomes. "All those events must ultimately complement each other. We will end up, though, with diverse and different festivals. And while most will have an exhibition or a music group, it will also emphasise the difference between, say, Drogheda and Dundalk."

It might seem easier to put spotlights on rooftops for Dublin Elevations, in which the public will dictate the pattern of spotlights in the sky, but it is not necessarily so. "There's a lot of legwork. Each individual building needs permission. In some ways that makes it bigger, because it has to be more calculated." But Campbell believes the outside projects have advantages for St Patrick's Festival as well as for the organisations that hire it. "We might be concentrating on production detail, but I do it for the creativity. It's a chance to work on a much broader canvas and with a range of artists."

He also finds that it gives him a chance to go back to the theatre groups and bands that were involved in St Patrick's week events and offer them a chance to use designs that might otherwise have had limited airings. "We've provided 50 to 100 per cent of the annual income for a lot of these artistic groups, especially if they don't have Arts Council funding, and it means that they then have costumes and puppetry that they could use during the year."

The widening of St Patrick's Festival's artistic horizons also means it has made many more contacts than most groups could hope to have. "In the past this wouldn't have been possible, but last year St Patrick's Festival ran a whole new raft of events. We had music and exhibitions scattered through the programme, lots of smaller events for different reasons. It meant we had a far broader arts base in the programme, as we wanted to get something for everybody."

As an organisation it now sits at the centre of what he describes as "the three interconnecting circles of culture, commerce and society. We might spend a day talking to the gardaí, then a youth group, artists and then city planners. It means that we have developed the skills and knowledge to deal with other events. It also makes each festival a temporary meeting point for these people to come together and discuss how best to run these events."

Has he found that the authorities' initial suspicion has gone? "Maybe. It is by working with the gardaí and others that we have educated ourselves in how it can be done well and safely, but we're also constantly surprised by the degree of ownership shown by all of these. There is incredible work done behind the scenes."

It has not, he says, meant that organising such events is now second nature. "It's not necessarily easier than before. There is precedent for some of these events, which is important. We know that it can now be done, these large gatherings in public spaces. People are well behaved and trouble free. But we do live in a litigious age, and the physical structure of Dublin makes it less easy to run events. Unlike New York, say, it's not built to a grid system.

"The difficulties of this year are a case in point. Because of the work on O'Connell Street it wasn't easy to invite a huge audience there for the parade. But it would have been difficult to move it elsewhere, because the other streets around it are too narrow."

St Patrick's Festival has no other outside projects in the pipeline, but it will likely continue to act as a one-stop shop for large events. Campbell doesn't worry that it might dilute St Patrick's week, only that it will mean more work for the company and people behind it. "It will never be easy," he says as he darts off. "Each year is a new challenge."