🇮🇪 Europe
The emerald isle: the Cliffs of Moher, pubs with live music, castles and endless green landscapes.
Ireland is small and you can cover the whole of it in two weeks, but it packs in an unusual density of landscape: in a single day you go from a cliff two hundred metres above the Atlantic to a valley with a sixth-century monastery, and from there to a town where at nine at night four musicians are playing in the corner of the pub with nobody having hired them. The green everyone talks about is real and has an unromantic explanation: it rains often, at any time of year.
For Latin American travellers there are two things that make it especially easy. One is the language: this is an English-speaking country where talking to strangers is normal practice, so you can sort everything out by asking. The other is the historical link with emigration, which feels close in Argentina: Ireland lost more than half its population in the nineteenth century, and that exodus left Irish communities in Buenos Aires, in the United States and in Australia. Many of the country's museums tell that story, and it reads differently when you come from the place those ships arrived at.
It is worth being clear from the start that there are two countries on the island. The Republic of Ireland is independent, uses the euro and is not part of the Schengen area. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, uses the pound and has its own entry rules. There is no check on the land border and you cross without noticing, but that does not mean there are no requirements: anyone going to the Giant's Causeway is entering the United Kingdom, with everything that implies.
The local currency is the euro (EUR). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for EUR →Dublin (DUB) takes most of the flights, and Shannon (SNN) and Cork (ORK) serve the west and the south. Dublin airport has no train: you reach the centre on the Airlink, Aircoach or Dublin Express buses, in a little over half an hour. Irish Rail's network is limited and mainly covers the Dublin–Cork–Galway axis, so much of the country is crossed on Bus Éireann and Citylink coaches. For the Wild Atlantic Way, the cliffs and the Dingle peninsula, a car is what opens the trip up, bearing in mind that you drive on the left and that secondary roads are narrow with stone walls at the edge. There are ferries to Britain and to France.
May to September is the travelling season, and June is probably the best month: the days are very long — by late June there is light until around half past ten at night — the landscape is at its best and the July and August peak has not arrived yet. September is the other good bet, with fewer people and slightly lower prices. You have to accept that it will rain in any month: the local saying about four seasons in one day is literal, and what you need is a waterproof jacket with a hood, not an umbrella, because the wind turns it inside out.
The rest of the year has its moments. On 17 March, St Patrick's Day, Dublin fills with parades and crowds, accommodation prices go through the roof and you have to book many months ahead. Winter is the cheap season, but it gets dark before five in the afternoon, many rural guesthouses and attractions in the west close or cut their hours, and driving conditions on the coast turn nasty. If your trip is short and centred on Dublin, it works all year round; if the idea is the Wild Atlantic Way, go in summer.
Irish cooking carried a bad reputation for a long time and no longer deserves it. The classics are still there: lamb Irish stew, potato-based boxty and colcannon, soda bread made without yeast and the full Irish breakfast, an enormous plate with eggs, bacon, sausages, tomato, beans and both white and black pudding. But the best thing in the country comes out of the Atlantic: Galway oysters, mussels, smoked salmon and fish and chips, which in the coastal towns is far better than you expect.
Guinness drunk in Ireland does not taste the same as anywhere else, and that is not suggestion: it is poured in two stages, with a pause to let it settle, and takes a little over a minute and a half. Alongside it are the beers from the small breweries, which have multiplied over the last decade, and Irish whiskey, triple distilled and smoother than Scotch. Two useful customs: at the pub bar you pay when you order and you do not tip, while in a restaurant with table service you leave between ten and fifteen per cent if service is not included; and there is the round, where each person in the group buys a full turn of drinks, so think twice before joining a table of six if you were planning on just the one.
Ireland is a very safe country and people are notably warm with strangers. Problems are minor and concentrated in central Dublin at night, above all around O'Connell Street and in some areas north of the river, where the common sense of any big city applies. Theft is opportunistic: wallets in crowded pubs and things left in view inside a car in the car parks of the western attractions, which is the theft most reported by tourists. The emergency number is 112 or 999; both work.
The public health system exists but is slow, and without cover private care is expensive, so travel insurance is essential. Pharmacies work well and pharmacists give advice, though several medicines sold over the counter in Latin America require a prescription here. Tap water is drinkable. There are no particular health risks and no required vaccinations. The real caution on this trip is a different one: cliffs and coastal paths almost never have railings, the edge is often undercut, the wind blows hard and every year there are accidents from people getting too close to take a photo.
Ireland is expensive, more so than Spain or Portugal and in the range of the rest of Western Europe, and accommodation is the item that weighs most: Dublin is dragging a housing crisis that has pushed prices far up, and in high season finding something reasonable in the centre means booking a long way ahead. As a rough guide, and not as an official figure, a dorm bed usually runs thirty to fifty euros, a mid-range hotel a hundred and twenty to a hundred and eighty in Dublin and somewhat less elsewhere in the country, a pub main course between fifteen and twenty-two euros and a pint between six and eight, cheaper in the towns than in the capital.
There are several ways to bring that down. Sleeping outside Dublin and using the capital only as your way in and out changes the maths quite a bit. Lunch in pubs usually has a set menu for much less than the evening à la carte. The Office of Public Works Heritage Cards give access to dozens of state-run historic sites for a fixed price and pay for themselves quickly if you visit several. Many of Dublin's national museums — the Archaeology one, Natural History, the National Gallery — are free to enter. And if you rent a car, add the insurance to your budget: in Ireland it is notoriously expensive and many credit cards do not cover it.
Conversation is the national sport. People talk to whoever is serving them, whoever is next to them in the pub and whoever passes in the street, and the answers are rarely short; that mix of chat, humour and anecdote is called craic, and it is what people are after when they go out. The humour is ironic and self-deprecating, and exaggeration is taken as read. On the other hand, direct confrontation makes people uncomfortable: an Irish person rarely says no to your face, and often 'ah, sure, we'll see' means no. It is also worth avoiding calling the country British or assuming it is the same as England, which is one of the few things that genuinely goes down badly.
Irish, gaeilge, is the first official language and appears on every sign in the country, although in daily life almost everyone speaks English. The exceptions are the Gaeltacht areas — Connemara, parts of Donegal, Dingle and the Aran Islands — where it is spoken every day and where many road signs are in Irish only, which matters if you are driving with GPS and looking for a name that does not come up. The other sensitive point is recent history: in Northern Ireland, the murals, flags and symbols of the neighbourhoods refer to a conflict that formally ended in 1998 but is still alive in memory, and you visit them with respect and without voicing opinions out loud.
Ireland's history starts long before that of almost any cathedral or pyramid in the world: in the Boyne valley, Neolithic farmers raised the great mound of Newgrange around 5,200 years ago, older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids of Egypt, with a stone passage aligned to the winter solstice sun. On that prehistoric base were laid, layer after layer, the Celts and their Gaelic kingdoms, the Christianisation brought by St Patrick, the dazzling golden age of the monasteries and their manuscripts, the Viking raids that founded Dublin, the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 and the centuries of English conquest that culminated at Kinsale, the plantations, Cromwell and the Penal Laws. It is the history of a small island on the western edge of Europe which, despite its size, projected its culture, its faith and its people across the planet.
The nineteenth century broke Ireland in half: the Great Famine of 1845-1852 took a million lives and drove another million into exile, and set off an emigration that for a century emptied the country through ports such as Cobh. Out of that bleeding also came modern nationalism, the Easter Rising of 1916, independence in 1922 and the painful partition of the island, with the long conflict in Northern Ireland — the Troubles — closing only in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. To travel Ireland today — from the pubs and literature of Dublin to the Cliffs of Moher, from Skellig Michael and its monks to Irish-speaking Connemara and the Arans, from the rebel city of Cork to the Giant's Causeway — is to move through that layered memory: the memory of a country that went from hunger and emigration to the headlong Celtic Tiger and the social reforms of the twenty-first century, without ever stopping looking at its past.
Read the full history of Ireland →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
