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New for 2000! Full-color sections let you experience Ireland before you get there. With region-by-region virtual tours and cross-referencing to the main text, Fodor's color sections are a great way to begin planning your trip.
Let the world's smartest guide enrich your tripFull-color images evoke what makes Ireland unique - Local experts show you the special places - Thorough updating keeps you on track - Practical information gives you the tools to explore - Easy-to-use format puts it all at your fingertips
Choose among many hotels and restaurants in all price categoriesStay in classic Irish castles, enchanting estate hotels, urban charmers, quaint B&Bs, and friendly farmhouse bungalows - Dine on inspired innovations, in casual country-house restaurants and cozy pubs and cafés - Check out hundreds of detailed reviews and learn what's special about each place
Mix and match our itineraries and discover the unexpectedDriving and walking tours guide you from Glendalough's ruins and Galway's festivals to Belfast's churches and the Ring of Kerry's coastal roads - Find sources for great contemporary crafts, European antiques, and hand-knit woolens and tweeds
Go straight to the facts you need and find all that's newUseful maps - Detailed chronology - Guide to Irish family names - How to get there and get around - When to go - What to pack - Costs, hours, and tips by the thousands
Destination IrelandAll the talk in Ireland these days is of change: An affluence previously unknown in the nation's history has led to a boom in the creation of luxury hotels, innovative restaurants, first-class golf courses, and stylish nightclubs. But beneath all the excitement and hurly-burly of newness, something essential and magical endures. This quintessence of Irishness is hard to define, but it has something to do with the myriad shades of green coloring a landscape that can shift suddenly from fertile plain to rugged coastal mountains. It's visible in the pace at which the locals live their lives, even in the middle of unprecedented prosperity, always taking time to laugh, sip a pint, and extend a warm welcome to a stranger.
DublinDublin is 1,000 years and more of history neatly packaged for your convenience. The port city on a deep bay has long attracted the attention of European invaders, and the fingerprints of her conquerors are everywhere. The gray, majestic St. Patrick's Cathedral stands on the site of the earliest Celtic settlement, where the man himself is said to have baptized locals in the 5th century. Nearby is the more austere Christ Church, built by the Viking king Sigtyggr Silkbeard in 1038. A 10-minute walk down the south bank of the Liffey propels you forward some 550 years, to when Elizabeth I built Trinity College to help subdue the quarrelsome Irish. The granite and cobblestone campus is modeled on its sister colleges of Oxbridge. With a 19th-century barrel-vaulted ceiling and gallery bookcases, the Long Room (213 feet, to be exact) might be the most impressive interior in the city, but Trinity's star attraction is the Book of Kells, an 8th-century illuminated manuscript and masterpiece of early Christian art. South of Trinity lies the heart of Georgian Dublin, whose elegant, redbrick town houses are fronted by door after colorful door graced with lovely fanlights. To get in touch with more recent history, cross the river to bustling O'Connell Street, one of Europe's widest thoroughfares and center of the 1916 Rising, which helped end foreign rule and return Dublin to the Irish.
"Me darlin' Dublin's dead and gone," laments the popular ballad, and indeed the pace of change in the old city has been breakneck over the last decade. A robust economy and a deluge of European Union money have transformed the once sleepy city into a cosmopolitan capital.
The MidlandsOverlooked and underrated, the Midlands beckon to travelers who like to stray from the beaten path. Although the area lacks a coastline, its waterways are a pleasure; many Irish people refer to the region as the Lakelands. Wild, unpolluted Lough Derg is the jewel of Ireland's 800 ancient, dark blue lakes and pools and draws all those who love fishing and other water sports. The moisture in the area's rich soil supports the formation of chocolate-brown peat bogs; take the Bord na Mona Bog Rail Tour in County Offaly to gain some insight into the complex ecosystem underlying the mysterious landscape. The bog lands' isolation protected one of early Christian Ireland's foremost monastic settlements, Clonmacnoise. As around Dublin, Protestant landowners in the Midlands built great houses to display their wealth: Strokestown and Belvedere houses are splendid examples, but Emo Court and Gardens in County Laois, designed by James Gandon, is the quintessence of Irish Palladian elegance. The region is home to some of the finest castle towns in Ireland. Castle Leslie, Castlepollard, and Roscommon are all classic examples of villages that grew up in the shadow of a great stronghold.
The WestThe West is wild -- both its landscape and its people. The only part of Ireland never settled by the English, the West seems ancient, untamed, and mysteriously different from the rest of the island. Nature was surely fond of the region, lavishing it with many disparate and spectacular sites. The 710-foot-high, 5-mile-long Cliffs of Moher rise vertically out of the crashing Atlantic. That same ocean throws some of Europe's most impressive waves against the feral beaches of Achill Island and the rest of the coast. The 16-square-mile lunar-like Burren is the nation's fiercest terrain -- miraculously, it is transformed into a riotously colored rock garden in summer. Beyond the Burren, the area is dotted with pristine, white-washed villages like Kinvara, Kilkee, and Ballyvaughan, where life ambles along in cozy slow motion, and a local fish market is the height of excitement. But put your ears up against a door or two and you might be in for a surprise: The West, especially the Gaeltacht -- as the Irish-speaking regions of Connemara are known -- is the heartland of traditional Irish music and dance.
Northern IrelandIn Northern Ireland one of the so-called peace dividends has been the opening up of this undiscovered province to adventurous travelers. The former splendor of Belfast City, a boomtown in Victorian times, is on view at the restored Grand Opera House and the exuberant, Renaissance Revival City Hall. But symbols and scars of the recent troubles still dominate the cityscape and well-rendered murals carry on a still-lively propaganda war; staunchly Republican Falls Road is home to the finest examples of this urban art. However disturbing, the tribulations of men can seem somehow temporary when you ponder the beauty of the North's varied landscape. Along the coast of County Antrim, the hazy sea pounds at the base of high, green hills dotted with lush, gently curved glens carved out by glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. Hidden in the glens, small towns like Ballycastle carry on an older, less hurried way of life typified by the Oul' Lammas Fair, a modern version of the ancient harvest festival of Lughnasa. Another wonder, the 37,000 hexagonal basalt pillars known as the Giant's Causeway, is the North's premier tourist attraction.
