What is it all about? 

This website hosts a weekly event guide for (mostly) free events in the Greater Dublin area.

This Event Guide was initially just a hobby project to keep friends informed about what is happening in Dublin by sending an occasional e-mail to maybe 10 people. In June 2007 I (Joerg Steegmueller) decided to write it regularly and to make it available to more people. The number of subscribers to the e-mail digest has now exceeded 1100 and is growing on a daily basis. Sending the guide by e-mail will always be the preferred and better suited way, but to archive all issues and to make the Guide available to a wider audience this site was developed.

The focus of the event guide is to inform about FREE events (e.g. Festivals, Street Performance, Concerts, Exhibitions, Talks & Lectures, etc). These events are often not sufficiently advertised due to the lack of funds or for other reasons and since the organisers are putting a HUGE effort into offering events for free, it is only fair to help with the advertisement through additional means like this Guide.

Since the start I have listed events from the Dublin City Soul Festival, the Festival of World Cultures, the Temple Bar Diversions Festival, the Dublin City "Summer in Dublin", the Bray Summer Festival, the Culture Night, the Fringe Festival, the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Dublin Opera Festival, to mention just the bigger events.

Organisers are explicitly invited to send information about their events to dublineventguide [at] gmail.com they are not expected to pay anything - the fact that the events are free is payment enough. Some ticketed (i.e. non-free) events can be included as well if the organisers are prepared to make a few tickets available for free, which then will be passed on to the readers of the Dublin Event Guide in the context of a competition.

If you would like to be added to the distribution list of the Event Guide, just send a brief e-mail to dublineventguide [at] gmail.com.

I hope you will find lots of interesting events with the help of the Event Guide.

How it all started! 

The idea for the Dublin Event Guide was born at the Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire in 2005, when I realised that a surprisingly small amount of people I knew were aware of the Festival. The following year I sent lots of SMS to friends to remind them of the festival.

Since 2005 the Festival of World Cultures has grown every year and is now well established (220,000 visitors in 2007!!!). Other Festivals are not that well known yet. The Street Performance World Championship in 2006 was brilliant but little known. In 2007 it had transformed to a very popular and well visited event and it will grow and prosper further. In 2007 another great Festival was born that had similar start-up difficulties: The Dublin City Soul Festival attracted a few hundred visitors, but far less than there should have been at such a brilliant free event.

With this Dublin Event Guide (for Free Events) I want to help the readers to have a great time in Dublin and I want to help the organisers to get the word out easier, cheaper and to a wider audience.

Press Coverage

Irish Times, 17 March 2008: "Have you money to burn?" by Conor Pope

Among many other great suggestions on how to save money, Conor Pope writes:
 "Free at last
Find more free stuff to do. There are hundreds of events happening around the country every week that won't cost you a penny. Listings magazines are the traditional source of information about such things, but there's also the Facebook Free Dublin guide. Run by Joerg Steegmueller, the e-mail digest of what's on in Dublin contains a head-spinning amount of free stuff from writing workshops for foreigners and feminist walking tours to classical concerts in the Hugh Lane Gallery and astronomy lectures in Dunsink Observatory. It now has close to 1,000 members and at the time of writing was looking for a new name."

The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 03 February 2008: "Clique Here" by Kathy Foley

In an article about social networking in general, and facebook in particular, Kathy Foley wrote about the Dublin Event Guide (for Free Events) and how the number of subscribers to the weekly e-mail digest rose dramatically once I had created a facebook group."