Clare is the heartland of Irish traditional music and Ennis is the best small town in Ireland to walk in cold off the street and find a session of musicians playing. The trick is that the venues change with the week: ask in any of the music shops on Parnell Street for tonight's list. The stalwarts are Brogan's on O'Connell Street, Cruises on Abbey Street, and Knox's on Abbey Street; each puts on a session most nights of the week through the summer.
For coffee and a daytime sit-down, the riverside cafés along the Fergus and the small spaces around Parnell Street and Bank Place do the job. Ennis is not a coffee town in the third-wave sense — it is a tea-and-scone town — but the standard has improved markedly in the last decade.