Almost every trip lands at Dublin, and two or three nights there covers Trinity College, the national museums, the Georgian squares and a day out to the passage tombs of the Boyne Valley. After that the country splits three ways. The southwest is the classic run: Cork and its harbour towns, then Killarney, the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula. The west trades those for Galway, the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher and Connemara, and it is the better half if you want fewer coaches on the road. The northwest, through Sligo, Mayo and Donegal, is the quietest stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way and the one that asks for the most driving. May, June and September are the months that balance daylight against crowds.
2 Ireland city guides
Fun fact
Irish is the first official language of the State and has been a full working language of the European Union since 1 January 2022, when a derogation limiting Irish translation ran out after sixteen years.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realityRain here is frequent and light rather than constant. Met Éireann puts most of the eastern half of the country between 750 and 1,000 millimetres a year and the west between 1,000 and 1,400, with April and May the driest months and December the wettest. What the numbers do not show is the pattern: showers arrive off the Atlantic, pass through, and take the light with them and give it back. Pack a shell rather than an umbrella, because the wind will win.
The realityCensus 2022 counted 1,873,997 people aged three and over who said they could speak Irish, two in five of that population, and a much smaller number who use it daily outside the school system. English runs the country. Irish is the everyday language in the Gaeltacht areas on the western coast, it is on every road sign, and it is a live subject rather than a museum piece.
The realityThe Republic of Ireland is the 26 counties covered by this guide. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, with sterling, its own police service and its own entry rules. The border is open and mostly unsigned, so it is easy to cross without noticing, and easy to notice afterwards when your phone bill arrives.
The realitySessions are real and they are scheduled. They cluster in particular towns (Doolin, Dingle, Galway, Ennis) and in particular pubs on particular nights, and the good ones are a circle of players facing each other rather than a band facing a room. Ask locally on the day, and do not talk over the slow airs.
The realityThe State is 70,273 square kilometres and you can cross it in an afternoon on the motorways. The coast is the catch. The scenery sits on regional and local roads where the default limit is 80 and 60 respectively, single track in places, and a distance that looks like ninety minutes takes three hours with the stops that are the reason you came.
Cultural notes that actually help
- Buy your round. Pub rounds run on turns rather than on splitting a bill at the end, and quietly skipping yours is the one thing that gets noticed.
- Order at the bar rather than waiting for a table service that is not coming, and check the kitchen hours: food usually stops well before the drink does.
- Small talk first. A question lands better after a word about the weather or the drive. Getting straight to the point reads as rudeness rather than efficiency.
- Let the person you are with set the tone on politics, history and the North. Curiosity is welcome, confident summaries are not.
- Learn the two words on the toilet doors: fir is men and mná is women, and plenty of pubs label them only in Irish.
- Tip by rounding up in a pub and by roughly ten per cent at a restaurant table when no service charge is on the bill.
- Drive on the left, and give way at roundabouts to traffic coming from your right. On a single-track road, the pull-in nearest you is yours to use.
Famous Irish faces
Seamus Heaney
James Joyce
Samuel Beckett
Mary Robinson
Bono
Sinéad O'Connor
Saoirse Ronan
Katie Taylor
W. B. Yeats
Oscar Wilde
Bram Stoker
Sally Rooney
Maeve Binchy
Enya
Dolores O'Riordan
Rory Gallagher
Christy Moore
Hozier
Cillian Murphy
Colin Farrell
Brendan Gleeson
Neil Jordan
Roy Keane
Sonia O'Sullivan
Henry Shefflin
Michael Collins
Éamon de Valera
Michael D. Higgins
Must-try Irish food
Irish stew
Lamb or mutton with potato and onion, simmered until the meat gives up. Beef is the modern shortcut.
Colcannon
Mashed potato folded through kale or cabbage, with butter and spring onion through it.
Boxty
A potato pancake from the northern midlands, made with grated raw potato and mash together.
Coddle
A Dublin pot of sausages, rashers, onion and potato, cooked pale in stock rather than browned.
Bacon and cabbage
Boiled loin bacon with cabbage and parsley sauce, the Sunday plate before roast dinners took over.
Seafood chowder
The standard pub lunch on both coasts, and the fastest way to judge a kitchen. Brown bread comes with it.
Smoked salmon
Cold-smoked over oak or beech and sliced thin, eaten on brown bread with lemon and nothing else.
Fish and chips
Cod or haddock in batter from a chipper. In Dublin a 'one and one' orders it without saying it.
Spiced beef
A Cork Christmas cure, brined with spices for days and served cold in thin slices.
Drisheen
A soft-set Cork blood pudding, traditionally eaten with tripe. The one to be brave about.
Guinness
Poured in two stages with a rest between them, which is why the wait is part of the order.
Irish whiskey
Triple-distilled as a rule, and single pot still is the style that exists nowhere else.
Irish coffee
Coffee, sugar, whiskey and cream, invented for cold passengers at the Foynes flying-boat terminal in County Limerick.
Tea
Strong, with milk, and offered within a minute of arriving anywhere. Refusing it takes two attempts.
Champ
Mash beaten with hot milk and scallions, served with a well of butter melting in the middle.
The full Irish
Rashers, sausage, egg, tomato and both puddings, black and white. Built for a day outdoors.
Galway oysters
Native flat oysters, in season from September, with a festival in Galway built around them each autumn.
Dublin Bay prawns
Langoustines, best plain with butter and bread rather than buried in breadcrumbs.
Irish beef
Grass-fed for most of the year, which is what the country's steak reputation actually rests on.
Soda bread
Raised with bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk instead of yeast, and best the day it is baked.
Barmbrack
A fruited tea loaf eaten at Halloween, with a ring baked in for whoever gets that slice.
Porter cake
A dark fruit cake made with stout, kept in a tin and noticeably better after a week.
Carrageen moss pudding
A set cream thickened with Atlantic seaweed rather than gelatine. A coast dish, not a dairy one.
