When Next We Meet: A Festival Where Passion Takes Centre-Stage

There’s a story behind every great festival. Some, as it happens, are more interesting than others. And often you can tell which ones deserve our attention from their names.

When Next We Meet, which takes place in the gorgeous surroundings of Raheen House Hotel, in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, over the June Bank Holiday weekend, is a very good case in point. It is an intriguing name for a festival that immediately draws the person who hears, or reads, it in. It implies an innate sociability. That there are special moments to be had. And that the event is predicated on a sense of community and friendship.

There is also in the name an invitation to become a regular – a winning touch where festivals are concerned. Which is why it has been building. Steadily and strongly. It has roots. The aim is to create something that is both cool and culturally resonant, which will endure.

BOUTIQUE FESTIVAL

“I’ve been deeply involved in music since I was a child,” David Anchell says. “Watching and listening to it. So when an opportunity to get involved in something cultural that revolved around music came along, I jumped at it.”

David is the founder and Managing Director of Camida, a highly successful sourcing, supply and solutions company based in Clonmel, that supplies specialised raw material requirements for the pharmaceutical, food and industrial sectors. The pharma and medical industry is thriving in Ireland, with exports hitting a record €138.6billion in 2025. Camida is hugely successful in its own specialist category, with a turnover of €65million. For the man at the helm, making a proactive contribution to life in Clonmel was always part of the plan.

In the music arena, David initially decided to support the Junction Arts Festival. But his primary commitment was to give something back to the community in Ireland – and to do that by supporting Irish music and Irish artists. That meant taking the initiative.

“I had this dream of creating a boutique-type festival in Clonmel,” he explains, “primarily to support local and contemporary artists who don’t have another vehicle. But it became clear that we weren’t going to fill an event with just those artists, so we had to make it a bit more commercial.

“It’s not really related to the business,” he says of When Next We Meet, “but our company has always been part of it.”

That involvement is approached in a spirit of altruism and of community. And it is driven by the passion that motivates David to get involved in diverse forms of creativity.

“The approach is unusual,” David avers, “number one, because our company has no interest in rock ’n’ roll as such. And the festival doesn’t make money, it loses money. But life is not about one single venture, or purely about making profits. It is about our passions and interests. My desire, from the very start with Camida, was that if we were going to have success, then I wanted to share it with the community – by doing ventures or events or projects that involve the community.”

When Next We Meet captures that spirit of togetherness. The festival has grown in an organic way.  Last year, the line-up included artists of the calibre of Skinner, Morgana, Zoé Basha and Paddy Hanna alongside headliners Pillow Queens and Villagers. With the highly talented production leads and festival co-directors, Eoin Hally and Kate Twohig, to the fore, its enviable reputation as a very special boutique festival event is spreading.

UNBELIEVABLY GOOD

This year, they have taken another Great Leap Forward, with more depth and bigger names. Local artists like Eve Whelan, Noah Hayes, Sun Merchant, DJ Lorcan Ryan and the Clonmel Community Choir – among numerous others! – will play again and rub shoulders with the likes of Mick Flannery & Susan O’Neill, Moxie, The Wran, Roisín El Cherif, Babyrat and AE Mak.

Oh, and on the Sunday night, the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon known as The Waterboys.

 

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Mike Scott and his crew have, of course, a very special relationship with Ireland. But for David, first and foremost, they are one of the great rock bands.

“It is a kind of crescendo this year, because we have The Waterboys,” David says. “I’ve been a fan, and listened to their music for 35 years. So I’ve put quite a bit of my own money, but also Camida’s money, into getting them to play When Next We Meet this year.

“They made three albums, in the early days, which were what the critics called Big Music. It was rock music and it culminated in an album called This Is The Sea, released in 1985, which to me – and I will say this onstage, if I get to do the introduction – is one of the very few albums in existence where every single song is a gem. It is famous for ‘Whole of the Moon’ – but the entire album is magnificent.”

David has followed every step in The Waterboys and Mike Scott’s sometimes circuitous evolution since, through his Irish years, the solo LPs and the album of W. B. Yeats poetry put to music, An Appointment with Mr. Yeats. “That appealed to me greatly,” David says. “And then two things happened. My son, for my 70th birthday, which was two years ago, bought me a ticket to a Waterboys gig in Galway – and they were unbelievably good. They were super, super good – so I was intrigued all over again.

“Next, Mike Scott brought out another Waterboys album,  The Life and Death of Dennis Hopper. You might well ask: how can somebody write a whole 25-track rock album on the life of a semi-well known film star? But you know what? It’s funny, it’s creative, it’s beautiful, it’s really good music. So, I thought: I’m willing to buy The Waterboys myself if it comes to it!”

And so it came to pass...

A LIBERATING POSITION

The commitment being made by David Anchell and the team at Camida to life in Clonmel extends into other cultural realms.

“We all have other things that drive us in life, outside of business,” he says, speaking generally. “So that’s one of the things that inspires me personally. We’re opening an art gallery in early June. It’s called a Mischief of Rats, because the collective noun for rats is a ‘mischief’ of rats. We’re also developing a restaurant, because I want there to be a really excellent restaurant in Clonmel. It won’t be an overcooked steak and chips restaurant, nor will it be a three-Michelin-starred restaurant with white totem table cloths.

“It will offer real quality cooking, like you get in the heart of Spain or the heart of France, here in Clonmel. I dream that we do it differently and with more soul than other places. And the big advantage is that we don’t have to make money.”

That is, indeed, a liberating position to be in...

“Whisper it – if we can break even, that’ll be great. Same as the Mischief of Rats Gallery. Same as When Next We Meet. We’ll sell coffee. We’ll sell paintings. We’ll sell tickets. But I don’t need it to make money. Camida is my commercial enterprise. The other things are ways of me, and Camida, giving back to the community here in Clonmel.”

That is a fine ambition – and as the line-up for the festival in 2026 emphasises, it is being realised in a way that is unique. The name, it turns out, explains a lot. Community, excellence, music, culture and friendship all come together at When Next We Meet, in Clonmel.

As Van Morrison said in the gorgeous spoken-word track ‘Coney Island’, “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time…”

• When Next We Meet 2026 takes place in Raheen House, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary from 29 to 31 May, 2026.