I love the EP. I absolutely love it. People embrace it. Now of course you know there always the knockers but there has never been any trouble, like in the town. I suppose there’s the odd bit of drunkenness, but I mean there’s never… everybody just gets on with it and literally embraces it. I think there is pride in the EP. When we were thinking of moving here, one of my sons said “Oh God with the EP you’d have to move out for the weekend”. But do you know, it’s the opposite. You wouldn’t go anywhere when it’s on, the atmosphere. When you go to drive from one end of the town to the other it’s going to take you twenty minutes, when it would usually take you five. But for that twenty minute, you’re looking at these characters, all these people. You even see some of the locals will sit out the front and watch, and everyone goes to the EP. The Electric Picnic Festival appeals to people cross- generationally and the policy of distributing tickets to locals and inviting groups to visit the site in advance of the festival create a sense of goodwill locally. Homescape The property. How alien that word when applied to what we know, in all its layered and clouded complexity, simply as home. First world, sufficient and minutely known, (Theo Dorgan, Back to the House my father built, Irish Times, Dec 30, 2017). As is the case with towns and cities throughout Ireland, a class pecking order was historically inscribed in the built environment in Stradbally. This may be expressed in terms of distinctions between social housing and private housing, between older, formerly tenanted cottages and bigger, one-off houses on the town’s outskirts. Memory narratives give us an insight into the class dimensions of small town life in Ireland, and in particular, the frugality and economy of working class homes in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. For some, a move from the vernacular cottage to newly built social housing or private housing was a significant advance: Born and reared in Stradbally, up the green there. I remember that it had no toilet. We had to sit in a shed with the roof gone off it. A very small house…there were two little rooms upstairs; one was only a half room, and a little kitchen downstairs. There was only half doors in the house. And the soap and water had to go out onto the road every time you washed yourself! Most participants could recall with clarity the day that they moved into their current home, and or laid the foundation stone for their home: I was so excited. I always remember that first day. It was s nowing. I came out and I got a horseshoe off the man next door. I put the horseshoe down, and I put silver and god at the front door and silver and gold at the back door. That’s for luck, you know. A silver chain and a gold chain. Participants take pride in local traditions of this nature, and express a keen appreciation of the history and heritage embedded in the bricks and mortar of their homesteads: 54