Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
It's that time of year again when the rock festivals kick into gear. They've spread prodigiously, and there are now so many that they're running out of suitable venues. If you wake up one morning and find 30,000 sunburned youths urinating in your front garden, two teenagers having a marathon snog on your doorstep, and a traffic cone on your roof, then there's a fair chance that your local park is hosting one.
By then, though, you and your neighbours will probably have objected to the licence, protested o your TDs and brought an action to the High Court. Now all that has failed, there is only one thing to do: send the kids out with a table and a dozen trays of Club Orange, at €3 a can. Then go along yourself.
If they are festivals of rock, they are also an exhibition of queuing. Traffic jams on the road there, backed up behind a car that's got stuck in the car park's muddy entrance. Queues for the kind of toilets that people would normally form a line to run away from. Queues for plastic "glasses" of beer, most of which will have been spilled by the time their purchasers get back to their spots, and the remainder warmed to somewhere close to the temperature of the sun.
Queues to get into the dance tent. Queues to get out of the dance tent. Lines of people pushing through the crowd at the precise spot where you plonked down your inflatable sofa. At no other event is it possible to pay €100 to see a major international band, and then miss most of them because you thought you'd nip out between acts to go on the Ferris wheel.
And all this while being charged prices last seen in Weimar Germany. There is something unique in the sensation of being charged a tenner just to find out what time the acts are on. Once you're prepared to splash out on that, the fiver for a bottle of water and €8 for a burger seems almost decent. It's why they could do with a bit of tweaking, something acknowledged by the evolution of the "boutique festivals". What's a boutique festival? Well, it's a difficult concept to pin down, but it roughly translates as: "no one peeing on your shoes".
Still, in this season of rock, the music festival does offer something transcendent. A moment of musical brilliance here, a gig of a lifetime there. And what other chance does a person have to get choked up at the sight of 20,000 inflatable sofas being thrown in the air at the same time?