Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Table of Contents
Every year on the seventeenth of March, the world turns green. From the Chicago River dyed a brilliant emerald, to the parades rolling through New York, Sydney, and Tokyo, this beloved holiday reminds us that no matter where we come from, a little bit of Ireland lives in all of us. Shamrocks appear on lapels, pints of stout are raised in toast, and for one glorious day, the entire planet seems to celebrate the small island nation that has punched so far above its weight in terms of culture, literature, music, and heart that it has become one of the most beloved countries on earth.
But here’s the thing: if you’ve only ever celebrated St. Patrick’s Day from afar, you are missing something extraordinary. Ireland itself, the actual island, is one of the most magical destinations on the planet. It is a place of jaw-dropping scenery, ancient history, warm and wonderfully witty people, hearty food, rollicking music sessions, and a pace of life that seems almost designed to remind you what it feels like to breathe. It is a country that gets under your skin in the best possible way, the kind of place you arrive at as a visitor and leave feeling like you’ve somehow always belonged there.
To celebrate this St. Patrick’s Day properly, the seventeenth of March, which is why we’ve chosen seventeen reasons, we are making the case that your next trip should take you across the Atlantic and onto the green shores of the Emerald Isle. Whether you’re drawn by the history, the scenery, the culture, or simply the irresistible pull of a perfectly poured Guinness, Ireland has something waiting for you. Here are seventeen reasons to start planning your Irish adventure today.
17 Reasons to Visit the Emerald Isle
1. The Cliffs of Moher Will Stop You in Your Tracks
There is a moment, when you first walk to the edge of the Cliffs of Moher and look out over the Atlantic Ocean, where your brain simply refuses to process what it is seeing. The cliffs rise over 700 feet from the crashing sea below, stretching for nearly nine miles along the wild Clare coastline, and they are so dramatically, impossibly beautiful that they feel more like a painting than a real place. Visited by over 1.5 million people a year, they are one of Ireland’s most iconic landmarks, and for very good reason. Go at sunset if you can, when the light turns the stone a warm amber and the sea below goes silver, and you will understand why people come back to Ireland again and again.
2. Dublin’s Temple Bar Is a Neighborhood You’ll Never Want to Leave
The Temple Bar neighborhood in the heart of Dublin is loud, colorful, cobblestoned, and completely alive. Packed with pubs spilling live traditional music into the narrow streets, galleries, quirky shops, street performers, and some of the best people-watching in Europe, Temple Bar is the cultural quarter of the city and the heartbeat of Dublin’s social life. Yes, it can be touristy, and yes, your pint will cost a little more here than in a local’s pub around the corner, but the atmosphere is electric and uniquely Dublin in a way that is impossible to replicate anywhere else. Pull up a stool, order a Guinness, and let the fiddles and bodhrán drums carry you away.
3. Kiss the Blarney Stone and Gain the Gift of Gab
According to legend, anyone who kisses the Blarney Stone (set into the battlements of Blarney Castle in County Cork) will be blessed with the gift of eloquence, charm, and a silver tongue that could talk their way out of anything. The ritual itself involves leaning backward over a significant drop (safely supported, don’t worry) to press your lips to the famous stone, which has been kissed by millions of visitors including Winston Churchill and Mick Jagger. The castle grounds themselves are a delight to explore, with beautiful gardens, a woodland walk called the Witch’s Kitchen, and a Rock Close steeped in Druidic legend. Whether or not you believe in the magic, the experience is unforgettable.
4. Ireland Is a Dream Destination for Families
One of the most underappreciated aspects of Ireland as a travel destination is just how wonderful it is for families. The country has a natural, easygoing warmth toward children; you’ll find kids welcome in pubs for most of the day, locals who will delight your little ones with stories and jokes, and an extraordinary range of family-friendly activities across the island. From exploring the medieval passageways of Dublin Castle to feeding farm animals in rural County Kerry, from the fairy-tale towers of Rock of Cashel to the interactive exhibits at EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Ireland offers families a rare combination of education, adventure, and genuine fun. The country is also small and easy to navigate, which makes it far less stressful to travel with children than many other international destinations.
5. Ireland Is Made for Road Trips
Ireland might be one of the world’s greatest road trip destinations, full stop. The country is compact enough that you can drive from one coast to the other in just a few hours (once you’ve mastered driving on the other side of the road, or course), but the roads, particularly the smaller ones, twist and wind through landscapes so gorgeous that you will want to stop every five minutes to take a photograph. The Wild Atlantic Way, stretching over 1,500 miles along the western coast, is one of the longest defined coastal routes in the world, taking drivers through some of the most dramatic ocean scenery imaginable. The Ring of Kerry is another classic drive, looping through mountains, lakes, and shoreline in County Kerry. Getting a little lost on a narrow country road with stone walls on either side and sheep wandering where they please is not a problem in Ireland; it’s literally the whole point.
6. Visit a Traditional Irish Village and Step Back in Time
Skip the big cities for a day or two and find your way to one of Ireland’s many small, traditional villages, and you’ll discover what most travel articles fail to mention: the real Ireland is found in these quiet places. Villages like Adare in County Limerick (often called the prettiest village in Ireland), with its thatched cottages and medieval ruins, or Kenmare in County Kerry, with its colorful shopfronts and artisan food scene, or Dingle on the southwest tip of the Dingle Peninsula, offer a slower, warmer, and often more authentic experience of Irish life. The pub in a small Irish village is a community hub in a way that has largely disappeared from modern life elsewhere, and sitting in one, listening to the locals talk, is worth more than a dozen tourist attractions.
7. Live Out Your Leap Year Movie Fantasies
If you’ve ever watched the 2010 romantic comedy Leap Year, starring Amy Adams as a woman who travels to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend, you will know that the film made Ireland look almost unfairly beautiful, but here’s the thing: it actually looks like that. The stone walls, the rolling green fields, the pubs with fires crackling in the hearth, the rugged coastline, the charming and slightly exasperated locals: all of it is real and waiting for you. Several of the filming locations, including the village of Dingle and the stunning scenery of the Dingle Peninsula, are easy to visit, and travelers who have made the trip specifically to experience the Ireland of that film consistently report that the real thing is even better than what they saw on screen. Romantic getaway, anyone?
8. The Guinness Storehouse Is a Pilgrimage Worth Making
You don’t have to be a beer lover to find the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin completely fascinating. Housed in the original St. James’s Gate Brewery building, a seven-story converted fermentation plant built in the shape of a giant pint glass, the Storehouse tells the story of Ireland’s most famous export with genuine flair, from the history of Arthur Guinness and his famous 9,000-year lease on the brewery to the science of the perfect pour. The experience culminates in the Gravity Bar at the top of the building, where you collect your complimentary pint and enjoy a 360-degree panoramic view of Dublin. It is one of the most visited tourist attractions in all of Europe, and it absolutely earns its reputation.
9. The Wild Atlantic Way Is One of the World’s Great Coastal Drives
We’ve mentioned it briefly, but the Wild Atlantic Way deserves its own spotlight. Running from Donegal in the north all the way down to Cork in the south, this defined coastal route connects over 2,500 points of interest along one of Europe’s most dramatic and least spoiled coastlines. It passes through small fishing villages, past ancient megalithic sites, along clifftops with views that stretch to America on a clear day, and through a landscape that seems to have been designed specifically to make you feel the full force of wild, oceanic nature. You don’t need to drive the entire route to be blown away by it; even a single day spent on a stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way is enough to understand why this coastline is considered one of the most beautiful in the world.
10. Ireland’s Food Scene Has Had a Quiet Revolution
For a long time, Irish food had an unfair reputation for being simple and stodgy: a land of boiled potatoes and not much else. That reputation has not been accurate for years, and today Ireland boasts a food scene that is genuinely exciting. The country’s farms and fishing fleets produce some of Europe’s finest raw ingredients: Connemara lamb, Atlantic seafood, artisan cheeses, and extraordinary dairy. Cities like Dublin, Galway, and Cork have flourishing restaurant scenes, with chefs who trained in some of the world’s best kitchens returning home to cook Irish food with pride and creativity. And for the traditional experience, a bowl of seafood chowder in a harbourside pub in the west of Ireland, made with fish caught that morning, is one of the great simple pleasures of travel.
11. The Ancient History Will Astonish You
Ireland is one of Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited lands, and the evidence of its ancient past is everywhere, often sitting casually in the middle of a field you happen to drive past. Newgrange, in the Boyne Valley north of Dublin, is a passage tomb built around 3,200 BC, older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, and it is aligned with extraordinary precision so that sunlight floods its inner chamber on the winter solstice. The Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, a dramatic cluster of medieval buildings rising from a limestone outcrop on the plains, has been a seat of power since the fifth century. Skellig Michael, the remote rocky island off the Kerry coast where monks built a monastery in the sixth century (and where Star Wars was filmed) is one of the most dramatic and moving places on earth.
12. The Traditional Music Scene Is the World’s Best
Ireland’s traditional music scene is not a tourist performance; it is a living, breathing, genuinely grassroots cultural tradition that happens in pubs and community halls across the country every single week. A trad session, as it’s known, is an informal gathering of musicians who play together with no set list, no leader, and no stage; they just sit in a circle and play, with fiddles, flutes, uilleann pipes, accordions, and the bodhran weaving together in an ancient sonic conversation. In towns like Doolin in County Clare, or Miltown Malbay, or Westport in County Mayo, finding a trad session on any given evening is simply a matter of walking into the right pub. Sit nearby, nurse your drink, and let the music do what Irish music has always done: make you feel things you didn’t know you could feel.
13. The Irish People Are the Real Attraction
Ask anyone who has traveled to Ireland what they remember most, and a remarkable number of them will not mention a single landmark or attraction. They’ll tell you about the farmer who stopped his tractor to give them directions, the woman in the post office who spent twenty minutes telling them the best place to eat in town, the stranger in the pub who bought them a round and spent the evening making them laugh. Ireland consistently ranks among the world’s friendliest destinations, and it is not hype. There is a particular quality to Irish hospitality; it’s warm, funny, self-deprecating, and utterly genuine, and it makes visitors feel, not just welcome, but genuinely liked and appreciated. This is a country that is deeply curious about people, and that curiosity makes it a wonderful place to travel.
14. Killarney National Park Is Ireland’s Natural Crown Jewel
Ireland’s first national park, established in 1932, Killarney National Park in County Kerry encompasses over 25,000 acres of mountains, woodlands, waterfalls, and the famous Lakes of Killarney. It is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Europe, home to the only wild herd of native red deer in Ireland, ancient yew woodlands, and views across the lakes toward the surrounding mountain ranges that are genuinely breathtaking in any season. The jaunting cars, traditional horse-drawn carriages driven by jarveys who are as famous for their banter as for their driving, are a beloved and fun way to explore the park, and cycling the Gap of Dunloe, a mountain pass through glacially carved landscape, is an experience you will talk about for the rest of your life.
15. The Causeway Coastal Route in Northern Ireland Is Unmissable
Don’t overlook Northern Ireland when planning your Irish trip; the entire island is worth exploring, and the Causeway Coastal Route in the north is one of the most spectacular drives in Europe. Running from Belfast to Londonderry along the Antrim coast, it passes the Giant’s Causeway (a UNESCO World Heritage Site of some 40,000 interlocking basalt columns formed by ancient volcanic activity), the dramatic ruins of Dunluce Castle clinging to a clifftop above the sea, the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, and stretches of coastline that were used as filming locations for Game of Thrones. Belfast itself, meanwhile, is a city that has undergone a remarkable transformation and now boasts a vibrant food scene, excellent museums, and the extraordinary Titanic Belfast, the world’s largest Titanic-themed visitor experience.
16. Ireland Is Surprisingly Affordable and Easy to Navigate
Compared to many other European destinations, Ireland offers genuinely good value for travelers who know what they’re doing. Food costs are manageable, particularly if you mix pub lunches with the occasional restaurant dinner. Driving the country yourself is straightforward, as long as you remember to drive on the left, and the distances are short enough that even a relatively modest itinerary can cover enormous ground. English is spoken everywhere, the Irish are exceptionally helpful to confused tourists, and the country has a well-developed tourism infrastructure that makes planning easy without feeling over-packaged or corporate. Ireland is, in short, a place that rewards travelers generously.
17. Ireland Will Change the Way You See the World
The seventeenth reason to visit Ireland is the hardest to quantify but perhaps the most important of all: Ireland changes people. There is something about the combination of the wild, humbling landscape, the depth of the history, the warmth of the people, and the culture’s deep comfort with poetry, story, music, and feeling that has a way of shifting your perspective on what matters. Travelers who visit Ireland for the first time often come back talking about a quality to the experience, with a sense of having genuinely slowed down, connected, and been reminded of something essential about human life, that they struggle to find words for. Ireland is a place that makes you feel like yourself, perhaps more fully than you have in a very long time. And isn’t that, in the end, exactly what the very best travel is supposed to do?
Ready to Plan?
Now that you have seventeen fantastic reasons to visit the famed Emerald Isle, why not celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in the best way possible: by booking your next journey to Ireland! Whether you can’t wait to get started on planning your Irish vacation, or you’d like to visit multiple countries throughout the UK, or even if you want to go somewhere completely different, I’d love to help you plan your next adventure; email me (gina@lotmv.com) or your favorite Love of the Magic Vacations Travel Advisor to get started planning today!