"The future is really bright," Richard Tierney reveals St Patrick's Day Festival is only getting started

Chief executive Richard Tierney talks to Galen English about his role in developing the event and how it’s become a central player in attracting visitors here.

St Patrick’s Day Festival 2025 is on course to be the biggest, brightest and most commercially viable yet thanks largely to the vision of one man.

Since the first official Dublin parade was sanctioned in 1931 the annual holiday was for a long time far more celebrated outside of the country than at home.

Grainy footage from the RTÉ archives of the 1964 parade shows a procession of flatbed trucks carrying newly minted farm machinery followed by a row of soldiers marching in lockstep past the GPO.

There is, of course, a smattering of marching bands, but it is light-years away from the international carnival of Irishness planned for this March. On March 17, the eyes of the world will be on O’Connell Street in the capital.

The St Patrick’s Day Festival is by far the biggest celebration of Irish arts and culture worldwide.

In 2024, it delivered an astonishing overall media reach of over 400 million, publicity worth €522m, a digital and social media reach of 22m, a live audience in excess of 600,000 and a TV audience of 386,000 with a market share of 51%.

More than 4,200 artists worked on it and it generated 11,000 days of employment.

At the helm of the nation’s national day is Richard Tierney. He has more than three decades of experience across marketing agencies, music promotion and 21 years working for himself in commercial consultancy, where he brokered huge naming rights deals for the likes of 3Arena and Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.

When Covid wreaked havoc on the entertainment business, Tierney decided it might be the ideal moment to change tack.

In 2023 he joined St Patrick’s Festival as chief executive, tasked with increasing the commercial ability of the festival, improving its sustainability efforts and highlighting the values of community and diversity.

“When this came up, it instantly resonated with me that what a privilege it would be to have the steering wheel of the national day and nearly two and a half years on it still remains a good idea,” he says.

“I love live entertainment, I love culture, I love arts, I love the size and scale of it.

“It’s the national day  — half a million people on the streets, half a million people watching on television, a billion eyeballs looking at us on O’Connell Bridge. To be able to shape that and to shape the commercial and financial future of something that is very dear to the Irish nation was just really appealing.”

But there’s no manual on how to run and grow what is one of the world’s premium one-day events.

“I hadn’t much clue and they didn’t give me much clue what was going to unfold,” he says.

“My first order was don’t wreck it or mess it up because it is very dear to the nation. The brief is very simple: we are not-for-profit, so the first thing is don’t incur massive debt; we are two-thirds state-funded and then one third which we then have to raise.

“It costs €3m but brings in €116m and it nets back about €27m to the exchequer, although every year we still have to tell our story and prove our worth.”

He says that for many tourists, seeing the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin is a bucket-list event. This year it will bring in 110,000 visitors, predominantly from the US, but there are also Germans and a lot of Japanese.

“It is the kick-off to the tourist season, it is a vitally important component to show Ireland is open — most people who come now stay for between six and eight days,” he says.

“It’s also an opportunity to express what we do well as a nation: not to take ourselves too seriously, we’re colourful, we’re joyful most of the time and we have an expression of this within the parade.”

Richard says he understands the responsibility of organising an event so close to the nation’s heart.

“We have got to make sure we have a good offering; we are leaning away from Leprechaun land into the contemporary, vibrant immersive nation we are rather than going backwards,” he says.

“During the festival, robust research is done on the ground on both inbound and domestic visitors to gauge our satisfaction rating.

“Most festivals in Ireland would have a satisfaction rating of 60-plus. We are at 78, so we have a very high satisfaction rating but the challenge with anything that is high is that you have to maintain that.

“Actually, we did drop a point last year, so we are very mindful that we don’t take that for granted.”

Innovation is key to keeping the satisfaction ratings high and every year there are concrete steps forward.

This year Macnas, the performance company based in Galway, will be back. More than 200 street performers have been drafted in, over 3,500 people in marching bands from Ireland, America and even Austria, while many of the floats have been specifically designed to unfurl once they are clear of the overhead Luas lines to give spectators a better view.

Aoife Carey, the festival’s artistic director, who has come on board from Cirque du Soleil, has been given a free hand to run riot.

“My job as CEO is to give her [Aoife] that free expression while minding the numbers,” Tierney says.

But inevitably with such a steep learning curve mistakes have been made along the way.

“The first year I tried to put a bit of a rock’n’roll commercial footprint over the festival to do stuff like merchandise, programmes and sell a lot of stuff, but it didn’t happen at all,” Tierney ruefully admits.

“It’s not seen as a commercial opportunity like a concert where you might go to a gig and you buy your daughter a t-shirt and a programme.

“It was an eye-opener, but my job is to come in and try these things.”

What has worked has been the push to give sponsors more spaces and places to find a home as well as rolling out hospitality packages.

“Increasing the number of grandstands as well as hospitality packages worked massively,” he says.

“Americans, in particular, love buying a grandstand ticket, and you get lunch in The Westin or the Hilton and they love it.

“Each year the challenge has been raising €1m, which is why I’m here — because they didn’t hire me for my looks!

“The strategy is to be always more commercially independent than relying on pure state funding — that is part of a five- to seven-year plan.

“It is really important that we are not just seen to be taking from state coffers.

“This year is about bringing the festival back to the city and developing more sponsorship ideas around that.

“Our ideal sponsors are people associated with sustainability — the energy companies, the wind energy companies. We’ve got KIA, who have been with us four years, coming back this year.

“Accessibility is huge for us in terms of our neurodiverse parade space. So anyone who is aligned with our key pillars of accessibility, sustainability and add joy are who we are looking for.

“We had Mr Tayto last year celebrating his 70th birthday — it was great craic, he’s a national icon.

“Part of the challenge for me, which I haven’t fully cracked yet, is long-term partnerships, people who will sign three- or four-year deals.”

But Tierney insists the “future is really bright” and that the festival is “only at the start” of its journey.

“We’ve managed now to get ourselves in a really good place visually, creatively, commercially,” he says.

“We’re now going to build from here. The brief is to keep it alive, keep people interested in it and keep it moving.”

* This article was originally published on BusinessPlus.ie.