Gugai MacNamara of the Róisín Dubh: ‘There’s a wildness to Galway’

Gugai is an old Irish word for an egg. My twin sister was born with hair and I was born without it, and the first thing my mother said when I was handed to her was “my little gugai”. It just stuck, and now the only people that don’t call me Gugai are my mother and my twin sister. I have had it longer than my actual name. I grew up near Castleconnell and I went to school in The Crescent in Limerick City. It was great, a lot of my friends were in bands. If it wasn’t English or history, I had very little interest in school. I tend to be very focused on some things to the detriment of almost everything else. I went to college in Galway in 1996 and I did arts, studying English, history, politics and philosophy in first year. I definitely loved the student life more than the student work. I had a great time but I didn’t last very long. Once I ran my first gig, that was it for me. A few years later, in 2004, Simon Heaslip, Kevin Healy, Greg Healy and I bought the Róisín Dubh where I have been music booker ever since. I also book the acts for Big Top at the Galway International Arts Festival. My friends in Limerick had bands, so we were used to going and seeing gigs. When I came to Galway, there just didn’t seem to be any young original bands playing anywhere. Everywhere was a covers band pub. The main reason I started running gigs was to put on something that I would like to see. READ MOREWe do about 400 shows a year, from 30 to 4,000 capacity including the Big Top. I always try to focus on developing acts. I do a lot of stuff with Strange Brew, an independent music promoter, record label and radio show. On Thursday and Friday night at the Róisín we put on a couple of bands from 12am to 2am and there’s no cover charge, and we pay them. That’s just a really good way of getting bands in front of audiences and getting them to a level where they have fans.That’s why grassroots venues are so important for artists – you don’t get to play huge venues unless you are an essentially manufactured kind of band, unless you have worked and embarrassed yourself and made mistakes in small rooms. That is where people learn how to perform and how to interact with crowds and sound engineers and build their audiences. There are so many stadium shows and festivals for a country of this size. But if you want to go see Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift in Dublin that is going to set you back €500, or Oasis or Stevie Wonder – that’s going to cost you a lot of money. That might have taken you to 15 or 20 gigs in a smaller venue like the Róisín Dubh or Coughlan’s in Cork City. It can be hard booking acts, but the one advantage we have is that everybody loves coming to Galway. There’s a wildness to Galway – the weather is insane, but it’s just so vibrant. There is such a mix of people from all over the world who come through here and they stay and never leave, or else they leave and they come back every year. It’s always had this mad artistic energy that permeates through the whole city. Fifteen years ago, some of the really big successful bands sounded like they could have been English or American. But now if you look at Ireland, all these bands that are huge international successes couldn’t be from anywhere else in the world other than Ireland. And that is incredible. That’s what I really love to see. It’s not a band that you could pick up and put anywhere else. You listen to Madra Salach, Kneecap or CMAT – any of these bands you know straight away that they are Irish.[ Camille O’Sullivan on her cancer: ‘You have to go further than a smear test’Opens in new window ]I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world I would rather live in than Ireland. A lot of Irish people who moved away feel like that. A lot of people I know who moved away are just waiting to move back. I am proud to be Irish. It’s one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The whole west coast of Ireland along the Atlantic is incredible. I have been to beaches all over the world and there is nowhere as nice as the west of Ireland on a sunny day, the rare amount of them that we get. Someone once told me that we are much better off that way because if the weather was any better it would just be full of English people all the time, so maybe we should be thankful for the rain keeping tourism down. We’re definitely not like other English-speaking countries. Everyone knows that. When you are in London you can spot the Irish people on the Tube by the people who say hello when they get on. There is definitely a lyricism to the way Irish people think and talk. There are a lot of incredibly talented people in Ireland. Maybe it is just that their talent gets nurtured a bit more and that pub culture/trad session culture is a bit more ingrained in Irish people – we just love singalongs.There is a lot of negativity at the moment, this “Ireland for Irish people” bullshit, but I don’t think that’s a huge populist movement. I think that is an insane, radical, small and very vocal group of crazy people that don’t understand what Irishness is, or know why Irish people are everywhere around the world. Anyone in Ireland who gives out about immigrants coming into Ireland should take a look at what we did to other countries. We should be the most welcoming country in the world because every country took us in. In conversation with Niamh Browne