Electric Picnic marks 20 years of Mindfield with podcasts, broadcasts and US 'broligarchy'
Dawn O'Porter, the Blindboy Podcast and Dylan Moran are among the speakers at the Electric Picnic's Mindfield section, which turns 20 this year.
They will be joined by CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Happy Mondays’ Rowetta, and Nicola Tallant’s Crime World Podcast, in over 120 events across six stages.
Organisers say this year's event also hopes to hold a microscope up to US ‘broligarchy’, with talks including Leviathan’s ‘Divorcing the Superpower: The US, Europe and the Next 250 Years’ and ‘Move Fast and Break the State: The Politics of Populism and the Broligarchy’, both hosted by Andrew Maxwell with panellists including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, economist Eric Lonergan, Mark Little and Jennifer O’Connell.
Other US-themed talks include ‘Stealing Culture, Selling It Back: The USA at 250’ with Liam Lynch and Patrick Freyne, and a History Ireland Hedge School on a century of the Ireland–US ‘unique relationship’.
There are also performances by the Irish National Opera and a live broadcast of the RTÉ Radio One Brendan O’Connor Show. European gold medallist Ciara Mageean will also join comedian and podcaster Jarlath Regan to speak on life, love, loss and the persistence of craic in the face of adversity.
With Ireland holding the EU presidency, the ambassadors of Ukraine and Moldova join MEP Barry Andrews and journalist Shona Murray for ‘Europe: Accession’, while the ONE Campaign’s ‘Fair Play’ asks whether a generous Ireland can persuade the rest of Europe to invest in a common global future.
The music festival also features talks on its core topic, with Happy Mondays' Rowetta sitting down with Tom Dunne, while Terry Christian takes the Manifesto stage back to its Teenage Kicks as part of Jan Brierton’s Wild Words strand.
Meanwhile, the Beatles face cross-examination by barristers when legal podcast The Fifth Court takes on the most litigated band in history.
Club culture gets an inquest of its own: No Filler’s ‘Who Killed the Dancefloor?’ rounds up the usual suspects, while photographer Brendan Duffy opens his 15,000-image archive of Irish clubbing in the 1990s and 2000s for ‘The Only Camera in the Room’.
Electric Picnic takes place at Stradbally Hall, Co. Laois, from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th August 2026 and is sold out. The Mindfield six stages are: Ah, Hear (Podcast Stage); Leviathan (Political Cabaret Stage); Manifesto (Writing and Ideas Stage); The Theatre; The Word (Spoken Word Stage); and An Puball Gaeilge (Irish Language Stage).
