Naoise Nunn
Credit: Allen Kiely 

Next weekend will see the Kilkenny Law Festival fill venues across the beautiful city of Kilkenny from Friday to Sunday. Unlike a traditional legal conference, the festival is not aimed primarily at lawyers, but it is hoped that it will broaden public understanding of the law and, perhaps, provide a little bit of entertainment at the same time.

For organiser Naoise Nunn “intelligent entertainment or infotainment” is what he is in the business of. Having worked in festivals for the last 30 years, starting out on Cat Laughs Comedy Festival and having worked for the last 15 to 16 years on the hugely successful Kilkenomics, his experience in festivals started with a student drama festival when he was a student at Queen’s University in 1992.

“I figured out that I enjoyed organising the festival as much as I did acting and I knocked the acting on the head,” Mr Nunn said.

He added: “apart from one very brief experience appearance with Cillian Murphy on stage in 1998 at the at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, which was a bigger staff theatre company production of Much Ado About Nothing, that Cillian was in and I had a very small role in which I rode a bike onto the stage and then off down the Castle Park in Kilkenny. So that was that was kind of the end, the beginning and end of my acting.”

I asked Mr Nunn if he had hoped to make a career in acting, but he actually hoped to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather who had been a diplomat in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Applying for law after completing his leaving cert he was accepted to a university in the UK but chose politics at Queen’s University in Belfast instead.

“I thought that was another route to go to getting into the foreign service, into the diplomatic service, which of course I never did in the end,” Mr Nunn said.

He has in recent years worked alongside the Department of Foreign Affairs in cultural diplomacy reflecting that he ended up doing a type of diplomacy in the end. Mr Nunn commented: “it is like that age-old story of the farmer in the field when you ask him for directions and he says, well, I wouldn’t start here.”

The business of festivals, however, is main focus of Mr Nunn’s career especially those, like Kilkenomics, and now Kilkenny Law Festival, that can “make something enjoyable, intriguing, fascinating and educational at the same time as being somewhat entertaining.”

Mr Nunn previously described Kilkenomics as turning economics from a subject people avoided to a weekend people queue for and I asked him why he turned his attention to law.

“So it’s really making the law, because the law touches everybody at some point in their lives, hopefully not too often, but everybody comes into contact with the law and lawyers, and it is a way of making it more accessible and less intimidating and daunting to people, but also mixing in some entertainment aspects as well so that you get this lovely mix of legal professionals and the general public,” Mr Nunn said.

“I’ve always had this theory that if you can make the experience of learning enjoyable, you’ll make it much more effective and much more sticky, that what you learn sticks to a much larger extent. So that’s been the that’s been the history of my work in this area. Leviathan political cabaret,” Mr Nunn added.

Kilkenny Law Festival, however, is not a solo effort and Mr Nunn was assisted in its inception by Mark Tottenham of The Fifth Court podcast and Enda Leahy of CEO of Courts Desk.

He has much praise for lawyers too noting that he is amazed by the incredibly hard work friends who are lawyers put in. He also noted having been an observer in a High Court case and being impressed with the patience and “huge degree of latitude” the judge gave to a person who was representing themselves. He reflected on how important this is from an access to justice perspective.

When I asked what the felt was the biggest misconception or misunderstanding that the general public have about the law, though, he said that in recent years he has been “darkly amused” with freemen of the land “and that kind of pseudo legal stuff that you see on social media”.

As for what to look forward to at the festival Mr Nunn, of course, recommends The Fifth Court podcast who will be interviewing Ronan McGreevy about his book on Seán Lemass.

Another one to look out for is one of the biggest UK legal podcasts, the Law and Disorder podcast, where Sir Nicholas Mostyn, Lord Falconer and Marie Baker will be discussing the failure of anyone to issue a writ of habeas corpus to release women incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries.

There will also be the Crime World podcast where Nicola Tallant will be discussing the most recent extraditions of organised crime figures from around the world, from Dubai and Spain into Ireland and the trials and stories behind them.

A highlight on the Friday of the festival for those who may be considering a career in law is ‘So You Want to Be a Lawyer?’ a student special hosted by Colm O’Regan.

I asked Mr Nunn what he, personally, was looking forward to. “I think, I think that probably the most interesting thing for me is we’ve got the use of Kilkenny Courthouse on the Friday.” Mr Nunn said.

“So we’re in courtroom number 3 and what we have is former Supreme Court Justice Marie Baker versus an AI chat bot. So we will be presenting a kind of a synthesised case, to both the judge and an AI chat bot and we’ll see what the difference is between them and then have a discussion about what that means for jurisprudence and for the legal profession and society in general.”

Mr Nunn is a native of Kilkenny and, as such, I would have been remiss not to ask what he felt festival attendees would have to look forward to in Kilkenny itself. Mr Nunn said: “One of the great things about Kilkenny, and it became absolutely vital during COVID, is the brilliant public realm that’s been developed largely by Kilkenny County Council.

“There’s a beautiful walk along the river with a boardwalk and it is really well kept. You can walk from St John’s Bridge in the heart of the city, down along the river and back up again and for three quarters of it, you feel like you’re in deep countryside.

“And then the Castle Park, which is amazing as well, it’s all completely free and it’s just beautiful.

“You can just pop out of the castle then and you’ve got great restaurants and bars to go into. And there’s just a great, great sense of nightlife and culture around Kilkenny. There’s nearly always a festival on or upcoming.”

Kilkenny Law Festival takes place from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September.

Naoise Nunn is a director of Schweppe Curtis Nunn. He is co-founder of Kilkenny Law Festival; co-founder, with the Kenmare design community, of Design Kenmare. He is also founder of MindField, the spoken world mini-festival at Electric Picnic; co-founder of Kilkenny Animated festival of visual storytelling; and former co-director of Kilkenomics festival of economics and comedy.