The big news is that Eyre Square is finished.

Even though its completion has been loudly announced it is still a pleasant surprise to come out of the railway station and not be confronted by hoardings. It is nice to sit on one of the benches running on the outer edge of the Square and have a football come bouncing out on to the pavement. A businessman on his mobile chipped it back in.

The women working in the Arts Festival's ticket office very kindly pulled up the shutter for a bedraggled stranger (it was raining) who arrived just as it was closing. That would not happen so quickly in Dublin. At the same time Galway has gone professional. According to the artistic director of the festival this has been its most successful year ever, with 150,000 people expected to have attended by the time it finishes today. Paul Fahy says: "We have sold 70,000 tickets to over 20 events."

One of the talking points of the arts festival was the Hughie O'Donoghue exhibition, in a temporary space at the Fairgreen Gallery. "That was a real coup, " says a Dublin observer. "They had a great exhibition; they had a smaller exhibition by Hughie on Inisheer. And they also made the point that they have no permanent space to hang big work."

Big sellers at the arts festival included the singer David Gray, the Hubbard Street Dance Theatre from Chicago, Alan Rickman's production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, and Mark Ravenhill, author of Shopping and F***ing, in his first one-man show.

But not everyone thinks that such professionalism and scale is necessarily a good thing. Project06 started as a protest at the arts festival's alleged lack of local artists. "I thought it was a great idea, " says our Dublin observer. "Because the two festivals could work symbiotically." How little she knew. There seems to be bad blood between the two. Worse, one of Project06's organisers, local hero Ollie Jennings, told the Connaught Sentinel that, unless new organisers came forward, there would be no Project07.

The Connaught Sentinel contains much of interest. The fact that, at a number of outlets, raw sewage is still going straight into Galway Bay. The fact that, since the beginning of the year, not one house has been built by the local authority in Galway. Not one.

"There's a huge hunger out there for people to be doing things, " says Jennings, of the success of Project06. "The festival's got quite formal and it's missed out on a lot of energy that's bubbling round the town. It's very corporate and narrow. We're not criticising the quality. It just has to find new ways of incorporating local energy. Little John [street performer gone inside] has sold out. Diarmuid de Faoite sold out. We had a lot of sell outs, not in places of 500 seats, but a lot of sell outs. The festival gets half a million euro in public money and some of that should go to acts like Little John."

Project06 firmly refuses the option to become a Fringe. It may stop here. Ollie Jennings's real job is managing the Saw Doctors. "I can't take three months off again, " says Jennings. "Not every employer is as understanding as Leo Moran."

At the Radisson Hotel the marquees are already up for the racegoers, of whom 4,000 are expected through the lobby each day. All 217 rooms in the Radisson are booked for the latter half of the week, with a few left on Monday and Tuesday, starting at 430 per night.

"Our rate for race week has been the same for the last three years, " says PR person Gillian O'Loughlin. "As people check out of the hotel one year they book in for the next."

The Radisson has lost access to its heli-pad, so presumably those coming to the Galway Ball . . .

about 700 people . . . will have to arrive by car or on foot. Philip Cawley is broadcasting his Today FM show from under the bamboo trees in the lobby.

TV3's Ireland AM's Tuesday morning programme will come from here as well.

However the Radisson ballroom last week also hosted a gig by the American band Lambchop.

When you walk past the Hughie O'Donoghue exhibition, you come to the tourist office where a very spruce old man is asking handsome young American backpackers if they have a B&B. In Galway everything is mixed up.