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Belfast · Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann · 2–9 August 2026
The live city guide to
Fleadh Cheoil in Belfast
What's on. What's busy. Where to go next. A free, mobile-first guide to every venue, session, gig, food spot and late-night corner of Belfast during Fleadh week — live-updated by the venues themselves and backed up by visitors on the ground.
The problem
Belfast hosts the world's biggest Irish trad festival this August. Nobody has a live guide to it.
A festival the size of a city
Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann is the largest traditional Irish music festival in the world, hosted in Belfast for the first time. Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected across the week.
A static programme
The official festival programme is a PDF and a printed booklet. Useful, but not live — it can't tell you what's on right now, what's sold out, or where there's still room at the bar.
Scattered everywhere
Visitors juggle Google Maps, Instagram stories, X posts and word of mouth to figure out what's actually happening in Belfast tonight. Operators have nowhere shared to publish updates.
The product
A free, mobile-first live guide to Fleadh week — realtime map, programme, venue pages, crowd reports, offers and a Cúpla Focal phrasebook. Built as a Progressive Web App, so anyone can use it without an app-store install.
Feature 1 of 7
A live map of the whole city.
Every venue running anything during Fleadh week, plotted on one map. Status halos show at a glance who's quiet, who's buzzing and who's at capacity. Tap a pin and you get the next three events at that venue without leaving the map.
- Filter by open now, capacity, food serving, accessibility, live trad and more.
- Pins cluster on zoom-out so the city centre stays readable.
- Geolocation-aware “near me” when visitors opt in.
- List view for accessibility-first browsing.
Feature 2 of 7
The full Fleadh programme — and Belfast TradFest the week before.
One programme covering the eight days of Fleadh (2–9 August 2026) plus Belfast TradFest the week before (26 July – 1 August 2026). Filter by day, by category, or by what's starting in the next hour.
- Day picker with a built-in countdown to opening night.
- Categories: Trad & Folk, Live Music, DJs, Screenings, Food, Family, Workshops.
- Featured programme curated by the editorial team.
- JSON-LD on every event page so Google rich-results pick them up.
Feature 3 of 7
A page for every venue and every event.
Photos, opening hours, kitchen hours, accessibility flags, live status, history timeline, walking directions, ticket links, save, share — and a per-venue chat thread for the questions visitors would otherwise ask the doorman.
- Operators control the page directly. Admins approve before publish.
- Status badge expires automatically — stale data flips to “unknown” instead of misleading.
- Schema.org LocalBusiness / Event JSON-LD for search engines.
- Fully shareable — every page has its own OG image and slug.
Feature 4 of 7
A live citywide feed.
Every status change, every crowd report, every newly published event — one stream the whole city can scroll. Tabs let you narrow it down to just operator updates, just visitor reports, or just new events.
- Crowd reports geofenced to ~200 m of the venue — you can't troll a pub from across town.
- Three reports auto-hide a chat message; admins review everything flagged.
- Per-IP rate limits and Cloudflare Turnstile on public submissions.
Feature 5 of 7
Your own Fleadh plan, saved across the week.
Heart anything you don't want to forget. Saved items work signed-out via local storage and sync to your account when you sign in — same plan on the laptop you booked flights with and the phone you're using on Botanic.
- No account needed to start saving.
- Past events stay visible in a “recap” view.
- Export-friendly — the data is yours.
Feature 6 of 7
Fleadh offers, in one place.
Verified venue operators publish timed promotions to a single, city-wide offers page — happy hour windows, set-menu deals, festival specials. Visitors can filter by day or by distance.
- Operators set their own start / end windows.
- No retroactive offers — the past doesn't advertise.
- Distance shown when the visitor opts into geolocation.
Feature 7 of 7
Cúpla Focal — a few words of Irish for the bar.
A curated Ulster Irish phrasebook with rough pronunciation for visitors who want to greet a session leader in Gaeilge without forcing app-wide bilingualism on every screen. It honours the language without getting in the way.
- Sectioned by situation: greetings, ordering, music, the craic.
- Pronunciation guides written for English speakers.
- The home screen quietly cycles through “welcome” in seven languages.
For venues
An operator dashboard built for festival nights.
Operators get a free, mobile-first dashboard. Two-tap status updates, full event listing controls (with CSV bulk import), timed offers, photo & profile management, and a claim flow for venues that already exist on the map.
- Free for Fleadh week. No card, no contract.
- Manual approval — usually within 24 hours.
- Per-venue chat thread answers visitor questions before they show up at the door.
- Live read of every crowd report your venue gets.
Mobile, without the app store
A Progressive Web App. Add it to your home screen and it works like a native app.
No App Store or Play Store gatekeepers. No 100 MB download. Just open the link and tap “Add to Home Screen” — Android Chrome / Edge gives you an install prompt automatically; iOS Safari hands you a standalone icon. On launch it opens chromeless, with our brand splash and offline-friendly shell.
- Install banner appears once, never nags.
- Standalone display, custom icons, brand-tinted splash.
- Loads on patchy festival signal — the shell is cached.
Looks like this on your phone's home screen.
Trust & safety
Moderated. Geofenced. GDPR-aligned.
Admin moderation queue, three-report auto-hide on chat, manual venue approval. No anonymous listings.
Crowd reports only count when the visitor is within ~200 m of the venue, server-enforced. Cloudflare Turnstile on public submissions, per-IP rate limits.
UK-GDPR privacy policy. PostHog analytics gated by explicit cookie consent — no advertising trackers, no data sales.
Read the full privacy policy and terms of use.
By the numbers
Where the Belfast Fleadh Guide is right now.
Belfast venues live
103
Events listed
205
Operators on board
3
Festival days covered
15
Fleadh 2–9 August 2026 + TradFest 26 July – 1 August 2026
Counts come straight from the production database and refresh every ten minutes.
Who built it
Built by Lavery's.
The Belfast Fleadh Guide is developed and maintained by Lavery's, the city's oldest family-owned bar. The map and timeline are city-wide and venue-neutral — every venue running something during Fleadh week is welcome on the same footing.
This is not the official Fleadh Cheoil app and we are not affiliated with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. For the official festival programme and competition information, please visit the Fleadh's own channels.
Lavery Ltd., 12–18 Bradbury Place,
Belfast BT7 1RS · Co. NI002186.
Next steps
Three ways to take this further.
Try it now
Open the live app on your phone — same URL, no install.
List a venue
Free for Fleadh week. Approval usually within 24 hours.
Press & sponsors
Press packs, sponsorship, partnership — all welcome.