Electric Picnic 2026: the line-up, the money, and what Stradbally gets out of it

Eighty thousand people a day will arrive into a field in Co. Laois this week for the twenty-first Electric Picnic, and the first thing most of them will meet is rain.

Met Éireann has heavy rain, isolated thunderstorms and a risk of surface flooding spreading up from the southeast on Thursday — arrivals day, and the day the campsites fill. Friday brightens into showers, Saturday is sunshine and showers, Sunday turns cold and thundery. The ground is hard after a dry spell, so the water will sit on top of it.

Everything else was settled a long time ago. EP26 sold out in under two hours on 3 September last year, before a single headliner had been announced. That tells you most of what you need to know about the economics.

The line-up

The rest is deep: Wolf Alice, Skepta, JPEGMAFIA, Wunderhorse, Men I Trust, Jessie Murph, Oklou, Geese, Armand Van Helden. The Irish end is deeper — CMAT, The Mary Wallopers, The Saw Doctors, Amble, Damien Dempsey, Mick Flannery, The Academic, The Undertones, Denise Chaila, Gurriers, Florence Road.

The clash that will ruin Saturday. CMAT is on the Main Stage 21:00–22:15. The Academic are in Rankin’s Wood 21:00–22:00. Damien Dempsey finishes at 21:00 on the far side of the site. Choose now.

Friday is a three-way pile-up at the top — Capaldi 22:45, Hemsley 22:45, Loyle Carner 23:00.

The site

Electric Picnic no longer really has a map so much as a small city plan. Here is ours — simplified deliberately, so it is readable on a phone with one bar of signal.

Beyond the four Main Arena stages — Main Stage, the Electric Arena, Rankin’s Wood and the Comedy Arena — the site holds another sixteen named areas. Freetown alone has fourteen venues inside it and runs from 6pm to 4am. BerlinHaus is a techno bunker only a few hundred people get into all weekend, with no phones allowed. An Chollchoill, the Irish-language forest stage, turns ten this year and TG4 broadcasts live from it on Sunday. MindField turns twenty.

Two names have gone: Body & Soul left after 2019, and Casa Bacardi does not appear in the 2026 listings at all.

What’s new

What to bring

On that last one — Decathlon Ireland is running a “No Tent Left Behind” pilot. Bring an eligible entry-level tent back with the receipt by 6 September and you get the full price in store credit, or half in cash. They are refurbished and resold.

@miriammullins_ Tips for electric picnic ! 🧺 #electricpicnic #festivaltips #festival

The toilets

The most-discussed change on site this year is plumbing.

Peequal women’s urinals arrive at an Irish music festival for the first time. Open-air, waist-height stalls — you squat, you are covered from the waist down, and the manufacturer claims they are about three times faster than a portaloo. They have been used at Glastonbury, at Primavera and at the VHI Women’s Mini Marathon. Melvin Benn says they will be “available at numerous bathroom sites across the arena.” Neither he nor the festival has said how many, or where.

Vacuum toilets, which use suction rather than water, go into the Main Stage blocks. There is a family-only toilet block in Croí. Free drinking water is always beside the toilets. Showers are confirmed for Family Camping and the Accessible campsite; general provision is not detailed anywhere. The main medical centre is in Jimi Hendrix and runs 24 hours, with first aid points in seven other places, and there are sixteen AIR hubs across the site with charging and Wi-Fi. Accessible viewing platforms are full and the waiting list is closed.

The money

Start with the number that should be the story every year and never is.

Against that, Melvin Benn puts the cost of staging Electric Picnic at €25 to €30 million, with site infrastructure — not artist fees — the biggest line.

What comes in is not published. EP Republic Ltd, which holds the licence, files abridged small-company accounts with no turnover line. The most recent on file covers the sixteen months to April 2023: profit after tax of €1.56 million, and €7 million in dividends paid up to its parent.

The ticket prices are public, though, so the arithmetic is available to anyone. Eighty thousand weekend tickets at €245.50 to €325.50 is somewhere between €19.6m and €26m; add early entry, campervan passes and booking fees and you land near €24 million. Which is less than it costs to stage. Sponsorship, bars, food concessions and premium camping are what make Electric Picnic profitable — not the tickets.

Fifteen partners are on the official list: Three, Smirnoff, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, Boots, Guinness, Bank of Ireland, Flogas, White Claw, Re-turn, the RSA, Pringles and Cheez-It, Velo, Today FM and TK Maxx. Three’s is the significant one — the first Main Stage sponsorship in the festival’s history, reported as a four-year deal. No value has ever been disclosed for any Electric Picnic sponsorship.

That exclusivity is what local producers keep objecting to. Ballykilcavan Brewing’s David Walsh-Kemmis told the council that multinationals “are able to buy exclusivity by providing sponsorship, so that any local companies providing the same type of products are not allowed to sell.” Benn’s answer was blunt.

One thing we found that has not been reported anywhere. On the UK company register, Festival Republic’s controlling shareholder changed on 1 April 2025 — LN-Gaiety Holdings out, a vehicle under Live Nation’s UK music arm in, with the Desmond family interest rehoused in a newly incorporated company. What that means for the Irish chain above EP Republic we cannot say; the Companies Registration Office was unreachable to us. It is a fair question for Festival Republic.

And the policing. Promoters pay for Garda cover — Festival Republic paid €349,000 for Electric Picnic in September 2022. But in April this year the Public Accounts Committee found the charging model, a flat €45 an hour per officer excluding overtime, “lacks the transparency and rigour required to safeguard public funds,” with no robust audit trail linking deployment to invoices, and warned public money may be subsidising private commercial events. Electric Picnic was not named. It is one of the largest such events in the State.

Sustainability

Electric Picnic publishes more waste data than most Irish festivals, and it is genuinely improving. It publishes almost nothing else.

Past that, the picture thins fast. There is no published carbon footprint for Electric Picnic. No water figure. No generator fuel figure. Its last independent Creative Green certification was in 2019, seven years ago. Flogas is Official Renewable Energy Partner, which is true and narrower than it sounds — it supplies renewable electricity through the grid, and it powers the Main Stage, not the site. Flogas says this “significantly cut” emissions. No figure has ever been attached to that.

Then there is the annual photograph of the abandoned campsite. Benn’s line has been consistent for years: tents left behind are “not a problem,” because everything recyclable is recycled. Laois County Council does not entirely accept that. Last July it voted to write to him about it, Cllr Tommy Mulligan describing gear “being picked up by these huge machines and loaded into landfill,” and Cllr Marie Tuohy calling it “wilful waste.” Volunteers currently get access to part of the site on the Monday only.

Stradbally

Six thousand people live in the Stradbally area. This weekend it becomes, briefly, one of the largest population centres in Ireland.

There is a formal Electric Picnic Residents’ Committee — and it is not a creature of the licence. We read all 51 conditions, and none requires a community liaison forum or a complaints line. It is a voluntary body the festival deals with by custom. Catherine Murphy chairs it. The notice for February’s AGM carried a line that tells you the workload: “the outgoing committee held 25+ meetings in 2025 - 2026.”

Resident tickets cannot be sold, cannot leave the household, and — a very 2026 clause — are “not permitted to be used for competitions or activity in any media, including social media.”

Not everyone locally is content. Cllr Aisling Moran went to the council last September with a list: not enough bins or toilets, Monday departure traffic, and a request that the biggest acts be staggered to spread the crowds.

“Unless Melvin Benn and Tom Cosby sit and meet with us,” she said, “every year we will be coming back with the same problems.” She also called the 2025 festival “a fantastic event once again.” Both are in the same speech.

The town’s publicans have historically been on the other side of it. Richard Dunne of Dunnes Bar told the Irish Times that early campsite opening had the town “very busy,” adding: “There’s never one ounce of trouble either.”

The only economic impact study that exists put the festival’s contribution at €36 million, €16 million of it in the Stradbally area. It was commissioned by Festival Republic, it covers the 2016 festival, and the event has roughly doubled since. Nobody has done another.

Who’s going

Something worth noticing: in an ordinary year the brand-and-creator announcements would be everywhere by now. This year not one Electric Picnic sponsor has publicly announced a creator line-up. We looked across the Irish showbiz press and the brands’ own channels and found nothing.

That may be coincidence. It may be a lesson learned. Last September four of the country’s biggest creators — Charleen Murphy, Lauren Whelan, Miriam Mullins and Garron Noone — attended with Coca-Cola, a company on Israel boycott lists, and faced enough backlash that each posted an apology video. Coca-Cola is a named partner again this year, with its own stage.

The recognisable non-musicians are mostly in the Comedy Arena: Deirdre O’Kane headlining the new Friday session, with Mario Rosenstock, Reggie Watts, Shane Todd, Kevin McGahern, Alison Spittle, Bernard O’Shea and Patrick McDonnell across the weekend. Tinie Tempah is Three’s City Stages ambassador and brings three winning Irish artists onto the Main Stage with him.

Still giving tickets away?

If you are still buying, don’t — unless it is Ticketmaster. Electric Picnic is a Designated Event under the Sale of Tickets Act 2021, so reselling above face value is illegal. There has not been a single prosecution under that law since it came in. Bank of Ireland reported a 28 per cent rise in purchase scams in the first half of this year; its head of fraud, Nicola Sadlier, warned that scams “can also be advertised on various forms of social media” and to “stop, think and check before making a payment.” The festival’s own line is the clearest: “We do not issue ‘Print at home’ tickets for Electric Picnic, any tickets that are offered for sale fitting that description are a scam.”

Getting there

The single most useful sentence in the Garda traffic plan: there is no collection point at any car park. The only one is the PUDO facility off the N80 on the Portlaoise side of Stradbally.

The R427 Cork Road and the Timahoe Road close from 10am Thursday to 4pm Monday; M7 junctions 16 and 17 are restricted on Monday morning. Trains run to Portlaoise, with shuttles every 30 minutes from 07:30 to 23:00, and to Portarlington hourly. Parking is free and open until 4pm Monday. Both the Gardaí and the festival warn against following navigation apps rather than event signage — and to fuel or charge before you arrive.

Sourcing note. Dates, capacity, licence conditions, waste data and the fee and bond figures are from Laois County Council’s statutory file for licence PL ref 26/160001, including the EP26 Draft Event Management Plan and Draft Waste Management & Sustainability Plan lodged on 25 March 2026. Stage times were published by The Irish Times on 24 August 2026 and corroborated by Hotpress and the Leinster Express; the clashes noted are our own reading of those times. Ticket prices, sell-out timing and the resale position are from the official tickets and anti-tout pages and Irish Times reporting of the September 2025 on-sale. Company figures for EP Republic Ltd are as reported by The Irish Times from accounts for the sixteen months to 30 April 2023; the company discloses no turnover. The change of controlling shareholder in Festival Republic Limited on 1 April 2025 is taken directly from the UK Companies House register; we could not check the Irish register, which was unreachable. Our ticket-revenue estimate is our own arithmetic from published face values. The cost of staging is Melvin Benn’s own figure. Garda charging findings are from the Public Accounts Committee, April 2026. The 2016 economic impact study was commissioned by Festival Republic. Residents’ committee detail, ticket allocations and the community hall proposal are from Leinster Express reporting and the committee’s own notices; councillors’ quotes are from Laois Today and the Laois Nationalist. Weather is Met Éireann via The Irish Times. Giveaway terms were checked on each promoter’s own site on 26 August 2026 and may have changed since. The site map is our own schematic, drawn from the positions shown on the festival’s published 2026 accessibility and campsite maps; it is indicative, not a survey. We have not reproduced any photograph, map or poster artwork from electricpicnic.ie, whose terms state its content is “made available for your personal non-commercial use only”. All photographs here are our own. Embedded video is from RTÉ News and the Irish Mirror on YouTube and from Miriam Mullins; we describe what each is, not the advice given in it. Several questions remain open and we have not put them to the parties: a carbon figure for Stradbally, the megawatt-hours behind Flogas’s “significantly cut”, and what the April 2025 restructuring means for the Irish ownership chain.