Buskers in Galway: Not in the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2020 neither on the streets

This article is about the communication of buskers (locals or not) in Galway – Ireland, and how they self-organized to participate in the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in 2020 and to fight by-laws voted to regulate their work in December 2019. The research question was: how did the buskers in Galway organ-ize themselves and use ‘radical’ communication to establish their position in the face of ECoC for 2020, the by-laws and the COVID-19 pandemic? Data was gath-ered by carrying out six in-depth interviews and 21 surveys with buskers that were in the streets of Galway in September 2021. Results showed that Buskers in Galway consider that ECoC did not truly take place in the city. We also under-stood that if there was a buskers’ ‘movement’ against the by-laws, it was limited to the time of the council vote.