Wilder Ways: Harrison Gardner, Lisa Clancy & Sean Lysaght
Monday, 6th October 2025, 7.30pm
Location: Festival Dome, Bridge Lane, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, F23 PN20
About Harrison Gardner
Harrison Gardner is an eco-builder, teacher, and broadcaster dedicated to making sustainable living accessible, practical, and inspiring. With two decades of hands-on building experience across the globe, he is the founder of Common Knowledge, a social enterprise in Ireland that empowers people with the skills to build and live more sustainably.
Harrison is the presenter of Build Your Own Home on RTÉ and the author of Build Your Own, a best-selling guide for self-builders. Through his writing, teaching, and media work, he champions community-driven solutions to the big challenges of our time — starting with the homes we live in.
He believes in people — their ability to learn, to adapt, and to become and create the very solutions they are so desperately seeking.
What if the answers to our housing crisis weren’t locked in government policy or developer margins — but already being built, quietly, by communities across the world?
In Our Homes, eco-builder and broadcaster Harrison Gardner explores inspiring, practical responses to the housing crisis — rooted not in a single solution, but in a diversity of approaches. From cooperative housing and land trusts to shared equity models and modular design, this book reveals how a patchwork of community-led ideas is already shaping a more hopeful future.
Part handbook, part call to action, Our Homes is a concise and accessible guide for anyone seeking to reimagine where and how we live. Because solving the housing crisis won’t come from one fix — but from many. And it won’t just be about building houses. It will be about building the kind of future we want to come home to.
About Lisa Clancy
Lisa Clancy is an insect photographer and nature enthusiast based in Galway City.
Her passion for the natural world began early and guided her academic journey, starting with a BSc in Zoology from the University of Galway, followed by an MSc in Biological Photography and Imaging from Nottingham University, and culminating in a PhD in Insect Behaviour from Aberystwyth University in Wales in 2015.
Lisa currently works as a research integrity manager at Compuscript in Shannon.
Insect Portraits is a captivating collection of portrait-style photographs that reveals the remarkable ‘personalities’ of (mostly) Irish insects and offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of scientific research using these extraordinary creatures. From bomb-sniffing moths to bacteria threatening to feminise entire insect populations, and flies that have lost their ability to hunt yet still need to present a dead insect as a nuptial gift – along with the ingenious, almost comical strategies they’ve developed to overcome this evolutionary misstep – this collection promises to transform how you see insects, if you’re not already a fan.
Shot in the stunning Burren region of County Clare and surrounding counties, this book celebrates the natural world while unveiling the rich, often surprising, and entertaining lives of insects – creatures so easily overlooked.
At a time of devastating biodiversity collapse, it serves as a powerful reminder of the value of these misunderstood beings, nuisance as they can sometimes be, by showcasing their charm and unexpected lighter side.
About Seán Lysaght
For over twenty years, Seán Lysaght has kept a journal recording wildlife, weather, landscape and the outdoor life in his adopted county. Unveiling the Sun: A Mayo Journal is a compilation of these entries into a single calendar year, from the precious crucible of January’s winter light, through the idyll of midsummer, to the keen focus of shortening autumn days.
As in his earlier books, Eagle Country and Wild Nephin, Seán celebrates the seashores, bogs and forests of north-west Mayo as well as the living world in his own locality near Westport.
The whole builds up to what Robert Macfarlane has called a ‘topography of self’, where, as Seán puts it, ‘A cherished landscape becomes a realm of potential not only for what it adds to general knowledge, but for what it reveals in ourselves.’
Seán Lysaght is a poet and prose writer who has been living near Westport for over thirty years. Originally from Limerick, he taught for many years at the Castlebar campus of GMIT (now ATU).
Gallery Press has published seven collections of his poems and translations, including The Mouth of a River (2007), Carnival Masks (2014), New Leaf (2022) and Selected Poems (2010). He has been hailed by Thomas McCarthy, in Dublin Review of Books, as ‘one of the most accomplished and established voices of his poetic generation.’ His biography of the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger was published by Four Courts Press in 1998.
BOOKING INFO: All events at this year’s festival are on a first come, first served basis. We recommend wrapping up warmly and arriving early to secure a seat. All events in the festival dome are free of charge.
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