Things To Do: Go see the mummers, dance to an author, tell a few ghost stories, avoid all bonfires and illegal activities

Our Picks

Our recommendations – no sponsored content, or adverts, just stuff we like.

Halloween is here, and to celebrate the transition into winter, we have prepared a themed list of events to check out over the next week.

Our theme for this spook-tacular edition of the newsletter is inspired by a recent meeting of Dublin City Council’s North Central Area Committee.

During the meeting on 20 October, Green Party Councillor Donna Cooney noted that there were a huge number of activities going on in the city, including the Bram Stoker Festival.

But the media has been “terrible” in acknowledging the existence of these events, said Cooney. “They said we haven’t got any alternatives to bonfires or illegal activities.”

In response to this criticism, we have conjured up a ghoul-tastic guide that is centred entirely around the theme of “things that are neither a bonfire or illegal”.

Interrupted Collective presents Systems

In September 2024, the Interrupted Collective was scheduled to launch its group exhibition, Systems, at the Central Bank of Ireland as part of the annual Five Lamps Art Festival.

But, the collective decided to cancel the show following the publication of a report in The Ditch that detailed how the Central Bank had renewed an agreement to facilitate the sale of Israeli sovereign bonds, which help fund its military and illegal settlements, among other things. 

Now, more than a year later, Interrupted Collective is finally set to stage the exhibition – at Axis Ballymun. Launching today, Systems uses painting, drawing, installation and video to explore our relationship with “the various systems we encounter on a daily basis” and how we navigate around them.

Featuring new works by Annemarie Kilshaw, Roger O’Neill, Sorcha Ní Neill, Paul Hickey and Steven Doody, Systems opens this evening at 6pm, and will run until 30 January.

Fingal Mummers

Up at Draíocht Studio in Blanchardstown, there is an opportunity to catch a performance by the Fingal Mummers this Saturday.

Mumming is an ancient form of masquerading, with its performers donning masks and enacting traditional play, usually around Christmas time.

The tradition is carried out across Ireland, as well as England, but Fingal’s mumming is distinct in that it mixes “representative dressing with masking and straw costumes”, according to the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage website.

The Fingal Mummers have been performing for over four decades, and at 4pm on Saturday, they will be holding another must-see session of traditional Irish storytelling as told through song and dance.

For more information and to book a seat, visit the Draíocht website here.

The Dupes

This Sunday, November 2, will be the 108th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the 1917 letter from British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, pledging his government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

To mark this occasion, Filmlab Palestine is organising over 500 Palestinian film screenings across the world, with the Free Space in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios showing The Dupes, a 1972 political drama directed by Egyptian filmmaker Tewfik Saleh. 

Based on Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novella Men in the Sun, the film is set during the 1948 war as more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes by Zionist paramilitary groups.

The Dupes follows the journey of three Palestinian, each from a different generation, as they attempt to escape the refugee camps in Lebanon and seek a better life in Kuwait. After the screening, the event organisers will be facilitating an open discussion with the audience.

The film will be showing at 3pm. Admission is free and tickets are going fast. Seats can be booked here.

Bram Stoker Festival

The Bram Stoker festival is back again this Friday, and already, more than half the events on its line-up have sold out ahead of time.

If you haven’t already booked something, there is still an opportunity to grab a seat at the Dublin Poetry Brothel’s Monto by Lamplight cabaret in The Church, on Jervis Street, or the live scoring of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 gothic masterpiece Vampyr down in the Light House Cinema, both of which are on Sunday.

Or, if you just want to pull up to something spontaneously, it would be worth dropping over to one of the free, unticketed events, like a tour of Marsh’s Library on Saturday, the Stokerland pop-up Victorian fun park nearby in St. Patrick’s Park across the weekend, or the Macnas Parade up at Mountjoy Square on Sunday evening.

But the major event, which combines two of our past recommendations, is happening over at the National Concert Hall on Saturday, and that is a special screening of Masaki Kobayashi’s horror masterpiece, Kwaidan.

An adaptation of the Irish-Greek author Lafcadio Hearn’s 1904 book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the iconic, visually-striking film brings to the big screen four of Hearn’s ghost stories. This particular version of the film will feature a specially-commissioned new live score, composed by Matthew Nolan and Seán Mac Erlaine.

Having premiered at the Osaka Expo 2025 earlier this month, the re-scored Kwaidan will get its Irish debut on Saturday night at 7pm. Joining Nolan and Mac Erlaine for the event is artist Tomoko Sauvage, the Paris-based artist who creates sound from ceramics, water and electronics, as well as actor Conor Lovett and theatre director Judy Hegarty Lovett of Gare St. Lazare Ireland.

Tickets are on sale here.

Zodiac Killer Project

On Monday evening, the Irish Film Institute will be showing filmmaker Charlie Shackleton’s new film, Zodiac Killer Project, a feature-length postmortem of Shackleton’s failed attempt to make a true crime documentary about the Zodiac killer. 

Re-telling how he imagined the film would play out, scene-by-scene, and coupled with shots of San Francisco’s Bay Area, stylised re-enactments, and clips from recent true crime hits, Shackleton’s documentary about a documentary acts as both a lesson in creative frustration and a critique of the true crime genre itself.

Zodiac Killer Project screens at 6.20pm, and will be followed by a Q&A with Shackleton, hosted by All You Need Is Death director Paul Duane.

Tickets are available here.

The Dublin Review at 100

Over at 1WML in the Windmill Quarter (or 1 Windmill Lane in the Docklands for those who didn’t understand a word of that address), the Dublin Review is celebrating its 100th issue on Wednesday evening.

To celebrate this milestone for the literary review, RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena will be broadcasting live from 1WML, which, despite what its name suggests, doesn’t have an enormous radio mast sticking out of its roof.

Joining host Rick O’Shea is the review’s founder and editor, Brendan Barrington, alongside frequent contributors Sara Baume, Patrick Freyne, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Mark O'Connell, with music on the night being provided by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Seán Mac Erlaine (in case you missed him at the National Concert Hall on Saturday). 

The live broadcast, which is part of the 2025 Dublin Book Festival, begins at 7pm, and if you want to attend, tickets are available here.

DBF After Dark Festival Club

It’s happened to everyone. You’ve read a novel by Nicole Flattery or Rob Doyle, or perhaps an essay by Róisín Kiberd, and once you were done, you thought, “Yeah, that was good, but do they know how to match some sick beats on the decks?”

Fortunately, that age-old question is about to be answered, courtesy of the Dublin Book Festival, because the writers are set to transform into DJs next Thursday at the Bartley Lounge in the Grafton Hotel on Stephen Street Lower.

Poet and playwright Lianne O’Hara, writers Doyle, Flattery and Kiberd, and poet and cartoonist Eoin Rogers, will be joined by Dublin Digital Radio residents FARO-P and Mittelschmerz for the DFB’s After Dark Festival Club at 9pm.

The event is free, although alternatively, you can choose a donation ticket to any amount which goes towards keeping DBF events accessible for all.

A bonfire

Don’t do it. Not even once.

Instead, you should prepare for our annual Dublin Inquirer pub quiz on Thursday, 20 November.

It is on in Cleary’s pub near Connolly Station at 7.30pm. Entry is €10 for subscribers and €15 for non-subscribers.

All money raised will go towards running the paper.

Email Sam at sam@dublininquirer.com to book your table – 14 of 20 tables are already booked! – and/or to contribute a prize, or swap one for an advert in one of our newsletters, or our print edition.

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Noticeboard

Listings of events submitted by readers – you can submit yours for next week's newsletter, via this form.

Halloween Punk Picnic

DU Punks is holding its fourth annual Halloween Punk Picnic at the Yeats Memorial in Stephen’s Green on Sunday, 2 November.

There will be zines, some food and a costume competition for a small prize. This is the last punk picnic until April, so come on down if you’ve been meaning to go.

The picnic starts at 1pm. For more information, follow DU Punks at @dupunks on Instagram or contact them at dupunks@gmail.com.

Arthouse 2025

Arthouse is a two-day auction in aid of Outhouse LGBTQ+ Centre on 8 and 9 November.

The timed online auction is showcasing a diverse range of affordable and investment artworks, including original paintings, limited edition prints, textiles and other 2D artworks.

To view the lots or register your bids, head on over to the Arthouse website here.

Christmas Market at the Hendrick

On 22 November, International Gallery Dublin will be holding a Christmas market at the Hendrick Hotel in Smithfield.

There will be music, food, arts and crafts, and visitors are advised to come early as the first 20 will receive a special gift.

The market will run from 2pm to 5pm. Entry is free, but booking is mandatory. Reserve your spot here.

Threshold – Come to the Edge

Artists Berni Bradley, Eibhlín Ní Ghabhláin and Liz Johnson come together for a new three-person exhibition at Reds Gallery Dublin in November.

Threshold – come to the edge, invites us to confront the unknown, sublime and the overlooked. Inspired by Christopher Logue's adaptation of Apollinare's poetic call to courage and transcendence, the exhibition reimagines the world not simply as a subject or backdrop, but as a threshold, an invitation to step beyond the familiar.

Curated by Tony Strickland, Threshold opens at 6pm on Thursday, 27 November with artist Cormac O’Leary opening the event. The exhibition will then be open for the public from 28 November to 3 December between 11am and 5.30pm.

English Language Course

Kaplan International Languages in Temple Bar is currently offering a free English course for those at an A2/B1 or B2/C2 level.

The course dates are from 3 to 28 November, between 2pm and 4.15pm.

For more information, or to find out more, contact ailsa.davidson@kaplan.com.

Met Éireann historic weather transcription project - Irish Weather Rescue

Met Éireann is calling on the public to help rescue millions of historic weather observations currently held in handwritten paper records.

The Irish Weather Rescue Project aims to digitise 3.5 million historic rainfall observations from 763 stations across Ireland.

Members of the public are invited to transcribe the Rainfall Registers Series that dates from 1864 to 1951 which is held in the National Climate Archive, managed by Met Éireann.

For more information, or to offer your assistance, visit The Irish Weather Rescue Project’s website here.