The Free Peace Festival in The Phoenix Park in 1978 can either be seen as a bitter disappointment or as a fantastic achievement depending on your outlook.
It can be seen as a disappointment for it was supposed to take place over a full weekend, feature over ninety acts over three stages and attract over 50,000 revelers, but in the end, the festival opened with only one stage, a handful of bands and only 3,000 or so fans.
The achievement lies that in the fact that a free festival took place in The Phoenix Park which attracted 3,000 people, three times more than the one the year before.
Irish Press, Aug 08, 1978.
Bill ‘Ubi’ Dywer (1933 – 2001), the ecentric Irish-born self-described ‘non-violent anarchist’ and main organiser, made his name running the Windsor Free Festival in London from 1972 – 1974 which saw over 100,000 attend and was widely seen as being the forerunner for the Free Festival Movement and directly the Stonehenge Free Festival and the later Glastonbury Festival.
Ubi and Friend. © Al Lyons
The 1978 festival in The Phoenix Park was supposed to feature over ninety acts including U2, De Dannan, Clannad, Horslips, Paul Brady, The Bach St Kids, VHF, Biro’s, Revolver, Rocky De Valera & The Gravediggers and Brown Thomas. I’m not sure which of those actually played in the end. As well as music, there was theatre, mime and an adventure playground for children.
Gareth Byrne remembers that day:
Saturday 5th August the first morning was bright when organisers began to arrive at The Hollow. The first band played to a trickle of spectators. By midday I spotted half a dozen individuals in wheel chairs at one corner, supervised helpfully by Fergus Rowan and a friend, who had arranged special transport. Gradually the attendance swelled to a few hundred individuals and parents with children. More bands arrived and got their gear ready. By lunchtime the sky had clouded over and there was a heavy downpour. Ubi donned a yellow showerproof cape and put a cheerful face on things by dancing and twirling to the music around the bandstand. I noticed a sharp row he had with members of one band who got nervous about the possibility of electric shock and wanted to switch off the AC/DC system. He effed and blinded loudly at them and insisted that the show go on. The shower died down, the sun reappeared, and Ubi disappeared. More people turned up to listen and the music went on smoothly until about 7 p.m.
Around 4 p.m. Ubi reappeared at the bandstand and looked the worse for drink. His reeking breath and raving demeanour suggested several double shots of Irish whiskey in addition to the customary pints of Guinness. A uniformed member of the Gardai (police) and a plainclothes detective tried to reason with him. He was escorted from The Hollow, somehow got to the ferry harbour at Dun Laoghaire and took the boat and overnight train to London. British newspapers reported a week later that Thames Valley police arrested him as he arrived at Windsor Park intending to launch a banned free music festival there. He was sentenced to jail and didn’t return to Dublin until the autumn of 1979.
In many ways, the Free Peace Festival was overshadowed by the first Carnsore Anti-Nuclear Rally which took place just two weeks after and attracted over 10,000 people.
Ubi later ran as an independent in Dun Laoghaire for the Dail in 1981 and 1982, receiving 927 and 418 votes respectively, and later was involved in the campaigning for legalisation of Cannabisand H-Blocks prisoner rights. He was involved in a cycling accident in the late 1990s in the Dublin mountains, never fully recovered from his injuries at died at the age of 68 in 2001.
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