Rory Gallagher Tribute Festival Faces Uncertain Future, Honors Guitar Icon

Every year in Ballyshannon, a small town in Ireland with 2,200 residents, an independent international music festival takes place to honor the most famous person born there: Rory Gallagher. Often heralded as one of the greatest guitarists ever, Gallagher died in 1995 at just 47 years old — yet his legacy has only become stronger each year since.

This year’s Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival (held May 28 through June 1) was the biggest yet, bringing in nearly 10,000 fans (compared with roughly 200 at its 2003 inaugural event), with nearly 6,000 coming from outside Ireland. The festival’s scale is unusual for an event that, by festival founder and operator Barry O’Neill’s own account, has never spent a cent on advertising. “It’s word-of-mouth,” he told Billboard during the festival, though he credits Ireland’s national tourism board for some of the international turnout. Before the 2026 fest had even wrapped, O’Neill was already calling it “the best one ever.”

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Then, just days after it ended, its future was thrown into doubt: Tickets.ie, the online ticketing platform the festival used for sales, abruptly ceased trading as part of a liquidation that left it owing over 1 million euros across several festivals and other events, including 283,000 euros owed to the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival, according to press reports. As O’Neill told Dublin publication Hot Press , he had been assured through email from the ticketing service that the festival’s remaining funds would arrive within two days. Hours later, he found a notice on its website that the company had shut down. (Oshi Software, which traded as Tickets.ie, didn’t respond for comment. Germany’s DEAG Deutsche Entertainment majority-owns Oshi Software through its UK subsidiary, My Ticket Service Ltd.)

On June 8, a petition to settle debts, liquidate assets and distribute any remaining proceeds was filed in Ireland’s High Court. The shortfall left the festival owing the artists and production companies 200,000 euros in bills, which organizers are now hoping to raise with crowdfunding (a GoFundMe has raised close to 99,000 euros of its 150,000 goal). On that page, the RG Tribute Festival account posted, “We continue to pursue every available legal avenue through the Irish High Court liquidation process in an effort to recover the funds owed to the Festival. At the same time, we remain determined to secure the Festival’s future through a range of fundraising initiatives and the incredible support of our global Rory Gallagher family.” One such effort includes partnering with the similarly affected Rockathon Music Festival on a joint benefit concert, One Great Day, set for Oct. 31 at Dublin’s National Stadium. The bill includes three acts from this year’s festival — U.K.-based band The Zac Schulze Gang, Irish power trio Pat McManus Band and Band of Friends — alongside tribute acts for Metallica (Whiplash), Alanis Morissette (Rugged Little Pill) and grunge-era rock (The Year Grunge Broke).

Held in a big-top tent along the River Erne since 2013, this year’s Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival saw over 150 performances with headliners including Billy F. Gibbons and the BFG Band, a blues-rock trio formed by the ZZ Top frontman; The Zac Schulze Gang; Irish blues act Johnny Gallagher & The Boxty Band; the Pat McManus Band; and English rock band Nine Below Zero. As always, the Band of Friends and the Rory Gallagher All-Star Band, both of which consist of Gallagher’s former musicians, perform as well.

Other billed bands and solo acts performed throughout a dozen bars and three public town spaces during the day and night, with most of them playing a few of Gallagher’s songs, if not entire sets devoted to Gallagher’s catalog. The latter disciples included tribute bands named after Gallagher songs like Continental Op, Crest of a Wave, Edged In Blue, Moonchild, and the Mississippi Sheiks. This year’s festival performers also played a wealth of music beyond Gallagher’s repertoire, including blues, traditional Irish music, plenty of well-known rock covers and even a tribute act to Horslips, another legendary Irish recording act.

In years past, other well-known guitarists and recording artists who have played the festival include Michael Schenker, Mick Taylor, Wilko Johnson, Jimmie Vaughan, Eric Gale, Bernie Marsden, Walter Trout and Joe Bonamassa.

The event’s origin began, fittingly, in a pub: in the early 2000s O’Neill and Boxty’s Johnny Gallagher (no relation but likewise a guitarist) were talking about Rory Gallagher, when O’Neill — who for his day job works as a sports broadcaster and producer for RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) — declared he wanted to start a tribute festival. While Rory Gallagher grew up in Cork and also lived in Derry for a few years, not only was he born in Ballyshannon but his family lived there for the first nearly two years of his life in a building owned by O’Neill’s family next to the Owen Roes bar (also owned by his family).

That bar is nowadays next door to an outdoor area known as Rory Gallagher Place, where a giant plaque dedicated to Rory hangs on the wall and which is where free concerts were staged during the festival. (There is also a Rory Gallagher statue in the town center and a giant Rory Gallagher mural in the Bridgend area of town.)

But for years, there was nothing acknowledging Ballyshannon as the birthplace of Rory Gallagher, until 2000, when the local hospital Rory was born in decided to put up a plaque acknowledging it as Rory’s birth site. That hospital — the appropriately named Rock Hospital — even held a ceremony marking the occasion, which Rory’s brother Donal Gallagher attended. While there, Donal drove through town, but didn’t see any other mention of Rory, except for a shop that had pictures of Rory in its window. So he wrote a note thanking that merchant for remembering Rory; and that shop, also, turned out to be owned by O’Neill’s family. After already deciding to honor Rory Gallagher, O’Neill then called Donal for permission to start a tribute festival — Donal fully approved.

Running an amateur festival at this scale hasn’t been without growing pains. With Johnny Gallagher’s help, the first thing O’Neill had to learn was how to build a stage. Even today, O’Neill says he is still learning and not always getting it right. In 2025, the Irish Music Rights Organisation sought roughly €37,000 in licensing fees and penalties from the festival, treating O’Neill as a professional operator. He turned to fan funding to cover that shortfall back then, too. This year, while the festival sells merchandise including shirts, pictures and postcards, Rory Gallagher’s music (on CD, vinyl or cassette) was nowhere to be found. And while the festival is staffed by hundreds of volunteers from the surrounding area, O’Neill doesn’t go with amateurs for security, instead hiring a licensed-security team to shepherd the event.

Since the guitarist’s death, Donal (with the help of his two sons Daniel and Eoin), has managed Rory’s musical estate, overseeing his recorded catalog now owned by Universal Music Group and including Strange Music, the publishing company Rory founded in 1972, which the estate still owns. Gallagher’s catalog generates 5,000 to 6,000 album-equivalent units annually in the U.S., according to Luminate, with global streaming of roughly 35 million plays a year. That catalog includes 11 solo albums and two live albums released while the guitarist was alive and another dozen or so compilation and live albums since his death, as well as the catalog of Taste — the band he founded before going solo.

In 2024, the estate sold Gallagher’s guitars and equipment at auction for nearly $2 million, including his signature guitar, the heavily worn 1961 Fender Stratocaster, which sold for roughly $1.2 million. Live Nation Gaiety Ltd. bought the guitar and it is now on display at the National Museum of Ireland, keeping it on home soil. (Fender has sold a replica of the Stratocaster through its Custom Shop since 2004.)

This year, there was a 50th-­anniversary Record Store Day release of Rory’s sixth studio album, Calling Card , and the Sept. 25 publication of Donal’s memoir, Edged in Blue: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Odyssey With Rory Gallagher , with a foreword from Joe Bonamassa (who released his own Gallagher tribute album, The Spirit of Rory Live From Cork , in June). But it’s the festival that has always had the most impact.

“The festival helps bring Rory to a younger audience,” Donal Gallagher said. “Rory had seemed to drop out of sight for a few years; then the YouTube generation came along, and with that — and the festival getting bigger — Rory’s stature has grown.”

Guitarist Johnny Gallagher agrees. “When we kicked this off, there was no music scene in Ballyshannon, the kids weren’t even playing music around here anymore,” he says. “Nowadays, the kids are all playing [a] Stratocaster because they found an icon. This festival has re-iconized Rory … If the festival is alive, Rory is alive.”

In a Sept. 14 email to Billboard , O’Neill wrote: “It’s been a tough three months, but I do believe we will rise again and have a 24th festival in 2027.”

A version of this story appears in the Oct. 3, 2026, issue of Billboard.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/rory-gallagher-international-tribute-festival-ballyshannon-1236350334/)._