Silhouetted in the night sky atop 400-year-old walls encircling the heart of Londonderry, or Derry, in Northern Ireland, a man spins flaming batons and another swallows fire, delighting children in Halloween costumes below. Nearby, steampunk time-travellers on stilts with illuminated globes navigate ancient cobbles on another street. Around a corner, young people dressed as zombies erupt into a dance and circus routine to Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Time Warp from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. For four days, culminating on October 31 with a parade through the streets and a firework display over the river Foyle, the historic city throbs to the joyful celebrations of Europe’s largest Halloween festival, the mood a million miles away from the Budget gloom in Britain.
The event highlights the city is seeking to transform after the pain of the Troubles conflict, and its legacy of poverty, into a vibrant and attractive place to invest. “This showcases us as a destination city,” said Greg McCann, president of the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce, highlighting the growing reinvention of a place once known for its shirt factories.
Now a hub for manufacturing, technology, advanced engineering and a cultural centre, the area also had the potential to develop green energy and data centres, said McCann. “We definitely have the bits of the jigsaw here — we just need to put them together,” he added.
Besieged in the 17th century as Catholic and Protestant kings battled for power, and blighted by tragedy during the Troubles when British soldiers fired indiscriminately at unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday, this is a city with many ghosts. The UK government caused a scare last month when, amid Budget pressures in Britain and financial woes in Northern Ireland overall that are crimping investment in key services, it briefly paused a £105mn investment into a so-called City Deal.
The investment is designed to boost transformative innovation, digital and health projects and research; the city boasts artificial intelligence and digitisation and robotics labs at Ulster University. It is key in a place where the peace dividend has proved elusive and poverty and levels of social deprivation remain high. But things in Derry are improving. Consultants PwC found a two-thirds growth in productivity per hour between 2011-21 — by far the highest in the UK.
Odhran Dunne, chief executive of Visit Derry, said the festival attracted about 100,000 people and gave the economy a £3mn boost. “It’s a Hallowe’en bucket-list destination, it’s up there with the likes of Transylvania, Salem in America, Day of the Dead in Mexico. It’s like our Mardi Gras,” he said.
Halloween may today feel like an entirely American excuse for candy and consumerism, but it originated in Ireland, in the Celtic festival of Samhain (“sow-wen”), which traditionally marked the blurring of boundaries with the underworld at the start of winter’s descent into darkness. Heather Wilson, 42, a healthcare administrator, travelled from nearby Donegal in the Irish Republic “for the fun”. “It’s my favourite holiday — you get to act like a big child and be an absolute fool,” she said, sporting a fake meat cleaver through her skull as she watched a local arts centre’s tribute to the movie Back to the Future — complete with an iconic Northern Irish-built DeLorean gull-winged car.
That event took place in The Fountain, a unionist enclave in the largely nationalist city where the kerbs are painted in the UK’s red, white and blue. Emily McCorkell, an American who co-chairs the LegenDerry Food Network that champions local food and drink, said the festival “is giving another identity to Derry. People are seeing it as more than just political turmoil, painted kerbstones and marching. People come together”.
Locals say the spark for the festival came in the 1980s at the height of the Troubles, which involved republican IRA paramilitaries fighting to reunite the island, loyalists battling to stay in the UK and British security forces. A bomb scare forced partygoers at a fancy dress event to leave a city pub, but they continued celebrating outside in what became an annual event. Indian, Chinese and South Korean residents and US visitors were among those out enjoying the spooky celebrations around walls steeped in history.
“We want to integrate and enjoy the culture,” said Roy Joseph, an Indian hospital technician, who has lived in Derry for 20 years and whose children were born there.
Manchán Magan, a cultural writer and broadcaster, praised the city for honouring its ghosts and Irish tradition, in a relatable, contemporary spirit, “not in some po-faced Celtic-y way”. Ultimately, the festival “puts a positive light on Derry — and we need as much light as we can”, said McCann. “There’s been a lot of negative news in Derry over the years — I don’t think that’s the place it is nowadays.”