Every year, Fergus Ahern marshals a catholic selection of work for the Boyle Arts Festival's main exhibition at the Convent of Mercy Complex. "Catholic" is the word. Long-established academicians rub shoulders with recent art school graduates in a big, cheerful rattlebag of a show, that is, perhaps, a bit too miscellaneous for its own good. The mixum gatherum format favours modestly scaled, strongly stated work. No alarms and no surprises. Anything too much out of the ordinary tends to sit badly. While the overall effect is conservative, Ahern has undoubtedly pushed and expanded the perceptions of his audience and he deserves credit for doing so. He also takes care not just to invite the same artists time and again.

It's good that some of the best work is by "local" artists - that is, artists who are living in the general area, including Veronica Bolay, whose two landscapes are strikingly good: a muted, Rothkolike composition of horizontal bands, and a beautifully atmospheric study of a mountain in hazy evening light. Nick Miller's landscape studies have the shock of the real about them, capturing not just the texture and colour of the things that make up the landscape but the moisture-laden air that lends them a vivid presence. Then there are Sean McSweeney's authoritative bogland studies, and Barrie Cooke dispatches from further afield.

Also included are two of the best paintings Sean Fingleton has shown for some time. There's a Chinese feel to Tim Goulding's Mist Poem, a damp rocky landscape, while his Winter Bulbs are all dry, concentrated energy. Geraldine Hone's coastal landscape is boldly Yeatsean. Mike Fitzharris has carved out a stylistic niche for himself between Patrick Collins and Tony O'Malley. But it's not all rural. Mary Burke shows Edward Hopper-like street scenes and Joe Dunne evokes the suburban world that is fast becoming Ireland's dominant built environment.

There's solid sculptural representation in the form of Catherine McCormack Greene, Jim Flavin and Brid Ni Rinn's carvings. Robin Buick is a vociferous advocate of what he describes as classical values in sculpture. His Figures for a Bacchanal Fountain, a bronze of a group of nude figures dancing exuberantly in a circle, takes pride of place in the centre of the room. Buick prioritises anatomical accuracy and no-one could dispute his technical skills, but they are not enough in themselves. "Classical" is simply not the term that comes to mind in relation to this work. His figures seem more like a bunch of enthusiastic naturists self-consciously advertising the virtues of nudity than abandoned bacchants.

It is a pity that, year after year, the festival's exhibition catalogue is little more than a black-and-white reiteration of artists' CVs. Colour reproductions are expensive, but a smaller publication, minus the endless CVs and with even a few illustrations would be a visual landmark each year. Then there's the strange case of the Civic Collection. Throughout the decade, the town - in fact the Arts Festival Committee - has built up an extremely impressive art collection, now numbering over 60 pieces.

This collection is technically on loan to Roscommon County Council (with some works lodging with the Brothers of Charity at Gleann Aoibhinn), because the County Council has the space, in King House, to keep and display at least some of them. But this has led to a strange situation whereby the festival describes its own civic collection as being on view "as part of the tour" of King House. Surely the civic art collection should be more freely accessible? Incidentally, there are ancillary events in Lough Key Forest Park around an incongruous concrete tower that occupies the site of Rockingham House. There you'll find a collaborative sculpture of what looks like a life-size Great Irish Elk made from twigs, plus a work-in-progress show of mosaics and murals.

This year's Iontas, the tenth annual Small Works exhibition organised by the Sligo Art Gallery, is particularly good. Admittedly, it would have been even better if it was trimmed a little tighter, but the show has a generous, inclusive air that is to its credit. There is a substantial overlap between Boyle and Iontas, but even so some of the best works are real surprises. Deirdre Morgan's Archipelago, for example, is a remarkable drawing, a minutely detailed linear network knitted into a right-angled grid, executed with a calm, even touch: a real find.

Morgan's cool, all-over composition strikes a chord that resonates throughout the show, in Gerald Cox's Pollock-like ink drawing, for example, or even Kirsten Doyle's flickering, dot-patterned painting, or Bernadette Cotter's incantatory Heart. Angela Gottleib-Fewer explores a similar idea in a different way in Network. Samuel Walsh's decisive charcoal drawings, in which rows of vessel shapes emerge from worked grounds, are also related.

There is always a great deal of expressive landscape painting submitted to shows like Iontas, something reflected in the selection. Arguably the dominant figure in the genre is Sean McSweeney, whose influence may be all the greater in that Sligo is his home ground, and sure enough the term "McSweeneyesque" could certainly be applied to the efforts of several artists.

Generally, though, like Siobhan O'Leary, they bring something of their own to the process. In Curlew SkyVera Gaffney slides the pigment across the composition. Maire Cregan's Strata is a schematic account of structure, while Hazel Walker's delicately atmospheric Denude strips the landscape down to the two tentative verticals of a couple of saplings against a misty grey ground. Equally, the buff washes of Helena Gorey's Badlands aim for both richness and understatement.

Mary Hurley's beach study is a strong traditional example, as are James McCreary's two miniature jewels, Fields. Among the sculptors Ann Mulrooney's bronze implements, halfway between fabricated utensils and organic forms, are striking, and Caroline Stapleton's two-part limestone carving is a very impressive piece of work. All credit to this year's selectors, painter Campbell Bruce, sculptor Jackie McKenna and Alexander Moffat from the Glasgow School of Art.

Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition is at the Convent of Mercy Complex, Boyle until Monday, August 2nd; Iontas is at the Sligo Art Gallery until July 30th and opens at the Limerick City Art Gallery on August 9th