Culture Night ’26: The Great Debate: An Election Night

👇 WATCH IT BACK! 👇

For Culture Night 2026, Red Bird Youth Collective invited you to The Great Debate: An Election Night — a live, satirical political performance where three fictional parties competed for your vote.

The candidates of the Pangea Party, Green Party and Other Party took to the stage with campaign speeches, political promises, public debate and plenty of election-night drama. Blending performance, sculpture, costume, character and satire, The Great Debate playfully explored the spectacle of elections and the ways politics uses image, identity and persuasion to win us over.

Throughout 2026, members of Red Bird Youth Collective worked with artists Paul McDonell and Taïm Haimet to imagine their own political world. Together, they developed fictional parties, candidates and campaign identities, creating sculptural and visual works using traditional making processes alongside digital technologies.

For Culture Night, this fictional political world came to life in a live public performance.

And the audience had an important part to play. They questioned the candidates, listened to their arguments, encountered their campaigns and, at the end of the night, casted their vote in a mock election deciding who came out on top.

Three parties. One planet. Your vote!

Poster design: Presley Grace, Red Bird Youth Collective member
Video & Feature image: Simon Boyle Photography

Red Bird Youth Collective is Galway Arts Centre’s youth-led visual arts collective, providing young people with opportunities to work collaboratively with professional artists, experiment with different art forms and develop ambitious creative projects.

The Red Bird Youth Collective 2026 project is supported by the Arts Council through the Children and Young People’s Project Award, Galway City Council Arts Office, and Culture Night.