Council's struggling tourism drive: Pipe band championships its best draw, yet this summer it clashes Ulster-wide band contest with 'Fleadh Fringe' open-air folk show on same day
A council with a struggling drive to lure in tourists has pipe band championships as its best performing draw – yet controversially decided to clash a prestigious band contest with an open-air Fleadh-related concert this summer.
That’s even though its officials have said the clash could see band parades restricted or re-routed because the two events will run at the same time a short distance from each other.
When it comes to staging events and festivals, Ards and North Down Council prioritises large-scale bashes aimed at bringing in visitors from outside the district.
That attitude, enshrined in its strategies a few years ago, hasn’t come without problems. It’s rankled with people behind smaller community events, for example, who have since complained of trouble getting funding from the council – which has resulted in the cancellation of some long-running shindigs that were mainly popular with people who live the area’s towns and villages.
Now council officials have revealed they’re not successfully bringing large numbers of tourists in, with major events such as the weekend-long Sea Bangor maritime festival still mainly attended by locals.
According to a report on last year’s council-funded bashes, 85% of people at Sea Bangor were from the area; the 15% who did arrive from outside the borough is half the amount of tourists who came in 2023.
The council spent more than half a million pounds on nine large events over the course of 2025, all of them aimed at bringing in visitors. Two-thirds of them heavily catered to locals, with four out of every five people at an Ards Peninsula food festival coming from the area, while less than one in 10 people at Christmas lights switch-ons in Bangor and Newtownards were from outside the district.
In tourist terms, by far the best performing were pipe band championships held in July. Close to half of that event’s attendees, 47% in total, journeyed into Ards and North Down from other areas.
This year, the district is hosting the prestigious Ulster Pipe Band Championships – yet the council has decided to help set up an open-air Irish folk concert on the same day, just a short walk away from the contest.
Earlier this year the clash sparked a serious split among area politicians, as unionists sought to see if the ‘Fleadh Fringe’ event could be rescheduled.
Alliance and the SDLP publicly accused unionists of trying to block the gig because they secretly harboured a dislike of the Fleadh in general, to outrage from the DUP.
Both the pipe band contest and the folk concert are scheduled to happen in Bangor on August 1, one day before the all-Ireland Fleadh kicks off in Belfast.
Near the start of the year, the council agreed to give a green light to the folk event after officials suggested that holding it on a different day would hurt its draw and result in fewer people attending, as it wouldn’t be able to compete with the Fleadh proper in Belfast once that gets under way.
When the report on 2025 tourism was discussed at a recent council meeting, the DUP’s Jennifer Gilmour suggested priorities should be split between big tourist events and popular community festivals, instead of concentrating so much on visitors.