Travel TV: Ireland’s most romantic settings for Valentine’s Day Destination V-Day Pól Ó Conghaile Twitter EMAIL PUBLISHED01/02/2016 | 19:30 SHARE Travel TV: Six of Ireland’s most romantic settings for Valentines Day Video by: Donal Corkery 360p high 00:00 / 03:00 Looking for a romantic setting for a getaway, canoodle, or to pop a certain question? Here are our 10 top suggestions! SHARE 1. Galway City The City of the Tribes (see video) beat off stiff competition from Dublin, Kerry, Cork and Kilkenny to be named Ireland’s most romantic spot by Swizzel’s Love Hearts last year, and there’s certainly no shortage of ways to dance with romance here. Steal a kiss […]
Happy birthday, brew you: Guinness Storehouse toasts 15th anniversary Deirdre Reynolds PUBLISHED02/12/2015 | 12:18 SHARE 4The Guinness Storehouse. Photo: Deposit Happy birthday, brew you – the Guinness Storehouse toasts its 15th anniversary in the capital today. SHARE The former fermentation plant famously underwent a massive €42 million facelift in 2000. A decade and a half on, the St James’s Gate attraction is expected to welcome its 14th million visitor this year. Celebrating the occasion, Guinness Storehouse Managing Director Paul Carty told Independent.ie: “When we first opened, our target was to welcome one million visitors. I saw that as very far off in the distance and stretching things to say the […]
Happy birthday, brew you: Guinness Storehouse toasts 15th anniversary Deirdre Reynolds PUBLISHED02/12/2015 | 12:18 SHARE 4The Guinness Storehouse. Photo: Deposit Happy birthday, brew you – the Guinness Storehouse toasts its 15th anniversary in the capital today. SHARE The former fermentation plant famously underwent a massive €42 million facelift in 2000. A decade and a half on, the St James’s Gate attraction is expected to welcome its 14th million visitor this year. Celebrating the occasion, Guinness Storehouse Managing Director Paul Carty told Independent.ie: “When we first opened, our target was to welcome one million visitors. I saw that as very far off in the distance and stretching things to say the […]
Ireland by Instagram: Top travel photographers showcase Ireland to 3.5 million followers #TalesOfIreland Online Editors PUBLISHED04/12/2015 | 12:20 SHARE 8Dún Briste, Co. Mayo. Photo: Conor MacNeil Four of Britain’s top travel photographers have been sharing images of Ireland with millions of fans on Instagram. SHARE The snapshots of iconic landscapes, buildings and hidden gems were shared by Ruairidh McGlynn, James Wright, Allan Hinton and Conor MacNeil as they ventured along some of the country’s most spectacular driving routes this autumn. The #TalesOfIreland campaign, a collaboration between Stena Line and Tourism Ireland, saw the photographers split into pairs and hit the road in classic 1973 VW campervans for an action-packed weekend. […]
Travel Writer, Mayo: “Because it wasn’t vineyards and bistros we initially had a feeling of being hard done by. We were, of course, entirely wrong.” Emma Sides chooses Belmullet over Bordeaux and discovers a holiday she didn’t know she would appreciate “Blind Harbour’s secret beach within a beach, reached by clambering through a small cave, still gave me a thrill and brought me back to boogie boarding on wooden surfboards (purchased in Cornwall in the 1950s) and cartwheels and handstands on the sand to warm up after.” Last summer, trying to save money, we ditched our plans for a continental holiday and exchanged Bordeaux for Belmullet, pretty much as far […]
666 years in the making, is this Ireland’s most haunted house? Loftus Hall’s devil in the detail Pól Ó Conghaile Twitter EMAIL PUBLISHED30/03/2015 | 22:46 SHARE 5Loftus Hall at Halloween. A group of paranormal investigators claims to have encountered “major temperature drops” and electro-magnetic field spikes at a house said to be Ireland’s most haunted. SHARE Irish Ghost Hunters (IGH) visited Loftus Hall on Wexford’s Hook Peninsula to carry out several paranormal investigations this March. The spectre-seekers found “major temperature drops” as well as “significant spikes” in electro-magnetic fields (EMF) in some areas of the house, they say. “Our team is scientific, we don’t work with psychics or mediums,” […]
Barfly: Porterhouse Temple Bar, Dublin Nineteen years after it opened, the chain’s first Dublin pub is thriving Porterhouse Temple Bar: walls are heavy with craft beer bottles, the stairwell lined with awards. It’s 19 years since Porterhouse opened their brewhouse on Parliament Street in Dublin 2. It wasn’t such a busy spot then: craft beer was foreign, Temple Bar was in its infancy, the boom was a pipe dream and a group of young men taking on the might of the brewing industry seemed like a crazy waste of time. Nearly two decades, six bars, a devoted customer base and multiple awards later and they seem to have made their […]
TripAdvisor reveals its Top 10 Irish Museums – No.1 fits into a single house in Dublin Punching above its weight Pól Ó Conghaile Twitter EMAIL PUBLISHED18/09/2015 | 11:30 SHARE 3Trevor White, Director of The Little Museum of Dublin, one of our less obvious attractions. Ireland’s No.1 museum is a small, non-profit housed in a Georgian building overlooking Dublin’s Stephen’s Green. SHARE That’s according to TripAdvisor, which has just named the Little Museum of Dublin as Ireland’s top museum in its Travellers’ Choice Awards. The non-profit museum, which tells the story of the capital throughout the 20th century, is just four years old. Its collection was donated by the public, with […]
Overseas visitor numbers to Ireland grew by 12.1pc in the first five months of the year. The growth sets Ireland on a course for its best ever year in tourism. “If this trend continues we will be looking at a record year for overseas visitor numbers,” said Minister for Transport, Tourism & Sport, Paschal Donohoe. Ireland is now in its fifth consecutive year of growth in visitor numbers, with the economic recovery, expanding air routes, a 9pc VAT rate for the sector and marketing initiatives like the Wild Atlantic Way and The Gathering all apparently paying dividends. 2007 was Irish tourism’s busiest year to date, with 7.7m visitors. “These are […]
Six Irish attractions have made it onto a list of the world’s top 500 must-see sights of all time, compiled by guidebook publisher Lonely Planet. The Cliffs of Moher are placed 378 on the list, “where Co Clare plunges off 214m-high cliffs”. The immense sea swell and craggy offshore islands attract big-wave surfers and puffins alike. “Northern Ireland’s most popular tourist attraction”, the “multimedia extravaganza” at Titanic Belfast, is the only museum on the island of Ireland to make the list, at number 424. With talking holograms, film footage, computer “fly-throughs” and rides depicting the ship’s doomed history, the museum “doesn’t feel macabre, celebrating instead the achievements of shipbuilders”. The […]