On the Town: For the 90 volunteers who took part in the International Women's Day Festival, it was time to kick back at the Síle Gig.
Nina Hynes performed, as did The Jimmy Cake, Jeff Martin and the folk/electronica music group, Halfset.
For Kieran Clifford, activism and outreach officer with Amnesty International, which organised the festival, "the most powerful element was the engagement of the volunteers. It was like the UN. There were Italians, Spanish, Belgians, Germans, Japanese, French, Americans, South Africans, Irish. They were mostly twenty-somethings, so we obviously hit a nerve with young people of that age".
The central message of the festival was to stop violence against women. On Tuesday night, those who had attended events, exhibitions and a march on the Dáil gathered at Dublin's Temple Bar Music Centre to enjoy the Síle Gig, the conclusion of the festival and a shared sense of a job well done.
"It's been really wonderful and the volunteers have been great," said Roxanne Macara, communications officer at Amnesty International.
The most moving part of the festival for Eva Szökvist, a production assistant with a film crew who worked throughout the festival, was the keynote address by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues.
"She got raped by her father as a child and she just said it out and it made it all more . . . real," said Szökvist.
David Lawless, the film crew's assistant director, said Maeve Binchy's monologue, which was part of a series commissioned by Fishamble Theatre Company for the festival, was the most powerful for him. Read by Rosaleen Linehan, he said the monologue "totally lulls you into a false sense of security and then hits home . . . It's about a rape, but from an innocent who doesn't really understand why it happened 50 years after it happened".