All Together Now debuted in August 2018, conceived from the start as something different from the major Irish festivals that came before it. The format was four days and nights, the location was an aristocratic estate rather than a fairground or industrial site, and the programming braided live music together with art installations and food experiences across the landscaped grounds. The word organisers used was boutique, which in festival language means smaller than Glastonbury and more curated than Electric Picnic. The Curraghmore demesne, with its woodlands and follies and lake, gave the festival a setting most events would have to build from scratch.

Then came 2019, and the queues. The 2019 edition was widely criticised for severe traffic problems, with attendees stuck in multi-hour lines both arriving and departing. Limited access routes, inadequate stewarding, and poor early communication from organisers turned what should have been a pastoral arrival into a roadside ordeal. There were also complaints about campsite conditions and sanitation, and questions about the festival's environmental footprint. The musical lineup and atmosphere still drew praise, but the logistics had cast a shadow that the organisers would spend the following editions working to dispel. By 2024 the festival was thriving again despite rising costs, and in March 2025 Hot Press reported the tickets had sold out completely.

The lineups blend mainstream and alternative without apology. Recent headliners include the Prodigy, the National, Jorja Smith, and James Vincent McMorrow, whose 2024 set drew on the kind of atmospheric Irish songwriting that suits a wooded estate at twilight. By early 2025 organisers had announced fifty new additions including Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, Lisa O'Neill, and Arc De Soleil, alongside DJ sets from Bonobo, Flight Facilities, and Groove Armada. Between the main stages, smaller arenas tuck into walled gardens and clearings, the kind of intimate spaces where you might wander into a folk set you had never planned to see and stay until the end.

Curraghmore itself is the festival's not-so-secret weapon. The estate has been the seat of the de la Poer Beresford family for centuries, and its parklands stretch across hills above the Clodiagh River. The house, with its distinctive equestrian statue on the roof, looms in the distance from many of the stages, a reminder that this is borrowed ground. Festivals on private estates exist in a kind of careful balance, and the Curraghmore arrangement has so far held. Each year the marquees come down, the speakers are loaded onto trucks, and the demesne returns to its usual hush, with only the trampled grass and the deer keeping any memory of what just happened.