THE thing about Irish film festivals is that they are just that - Irish - with a natural sense of fun combined with the most eloquent discourse anywhere, and imbued with an extraordinarily intense interest in film and its workings without a trace of the elitism that can infect some international festivals. And Galway, in its eighth year, is the most informal and unpretentious of them all; what it lacks in glitz it more than makes up for with a rollicking atmosphere and a friendliness that is almost overwhelming.

The newly installed director, Anthony Sellars, has worked wonders in the past six months and brought a new zest to the event while retaining its relaxed presentation and the Galway Film Fleadh has a new Town Hall Cinema to replace the fading Claddagh Palace which had one screen and a projectionist with a penchant for screening films at odd angles.

That ramshackle approach has gone with the Claddagh. Although the smallest film festival in the Republic following Dublin, which has lost much of its bite, and Cork, it runs concurrently with the Galway Arts Festival, akin to a micro-Edinburgh, and has become the bright young upstart with guests galore and a world or international premiere every night of its compact six-day run, including the public debut of Glaswegian director Gillies MacKinnon's Trojan Eddie, Anjelica Huston's Bastard Out Of Carolina, and a new Irish feature The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars, all of which will be screened at next month's Edinburgh Film Festival.

In many ways Trojan Eddie is MacKinnon's finest film to date, in his first Irish feature since The Playboys, starring Stephen Rea and Richard Harris, returning to his Irish roots to deliver his best performance in more than a decade. From a first feature script by Wexford playwright, Billy Roche, the narrative is slightly confusing and the eponymous character, Trojan Eddie, is curiously left circling the action, but MacKinnon's brilliantly visualised setpieces deliver a powerful all-encompassing sense of a dark Irish fairytale in scenes that haunt the mind long after.

Rea's sad, pull-down face and deadpan delivery are perfect for his leading role as the small-town ex-con Trojan Eddie, a failure in everything apart from his ability as a fast-talking, back-of-a-lorry salesman with the patter flicking from his mouth. Harris is even more impressive as John Power, an old traveller now settled as a wealthy robber baron ruling the town with a psychotic criminal hand.

Power falls deeply in love with a young tinker girl, Kathleen, wooing her with the promise of riches and then marrying her. But Kathleen elopes on the wedding night with his nephew, and Eddie's protege, Dermot, and the traditional ``dowry'', a suitcase full of money. Trojan Eddie is caught in a circle of revenge between the brutal Power and the couple on the run but begins to see a way to free himself from Power's grip and escape his life of failure.

Sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes violently shocking, the film is filled with the elemental beauty of rural Ireland and the traditions of the travelling people and this is MacKinnon in top form, producing a cutting, luminous blend of the mythical ingredients of his first short film Passing Glory and the harsh shock of his pre-Trainspotting drugs drama, Needle.

The festival previewed itself with a unique Festival Film School in which the creators of the opening film, The Last Of The High Kings, held seminars on bringing the film from script to screen before its festival premiere. An impressive posse of international industry names could also be seen relaxing under the influence of Guinness, after intense pitching sessions with young Irish film-makers, in the Festival Club, a converted boat club open to the banks of the River Corrib where there was some danger of literal overspill into the glittering waters leading to Galway Bay.

Antonia Bird flew in from LA for a tribute to her films including the outstanding Safe and Priest, while a strong programme of Brazilian films, Irish and international shorts, and an animation strand spooled out.

Only in Galway would you stand, as I did, beside the Irish Minister for Arts and Culture, Michael D Higgins, in for a chat in a pub fizzing with the ``crack'', before attending the late night screening of the smallest budget feature on show, The Eliminator, a high-octane surreal thriller made by a group of complete unknowns from Armagh for #8000.

The Eliminator was the surprise sensation of the festival; ironic, wickedly funny, and action-packed, it is set in a future war-torn Ireland and climaxes with St Patrick and Finn MacCuhal rising from the dead. You get the gist. Audacious enthusiasm and wild humour overrides the flaws of this no-budget feature and the screening was greeted with cheers for the first-time writer/director/ producer-make up man Enda Hughes.

The festival closed with the premiere of Some Mother's Son, Terry George's directorial debut produced by Jim Sheridan, a natural successor to In The Name Of The Father which George scripted and Sheridan directed. The story of two Belfast mothers, bravely played by Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan, with imprisoned sons on hunger strike in the eighties, could not have been more horrifically topical as the despairing daily headlines of the Irish papers declared ``Abandon hope'' and ``No Surrender'' over pictures of the North burning in the most tragically defining moment of this year in Ireland.

Sometimes the only antidote is humour and Galway presented the first Comedy Masterclass for new Irish comedy writers appropriately conducted by the award-winning Father Ted team, writers Graham Lineham and Arthur Matthews, along with director Declan Lowny, in an all-day session in which they dissected the development of the priestly hit TV series.

And only in Galway would the last session be presented in the back room of the King's Head pub with free stout issued as the writers screened their favourite film comedy clips, interspersed with stand-up slots from Terry Tiernan and his Gael Force team of Irish comics who, like some of the films in the Fleadh, will soon be flying to Edinburgh.