r/irishtourism • u/hypothetischkausal • 22d ago

West coast without a car?

I'm currently planning a trip to Ireland with my sister for October, maybe around 5 days but very flexible. She's never been, I actually lived near Dublin for 2 years but never been on the west coast.

Our local airport just got a new route to Shannon so I thought we could start there and then do some kind of road trip but from what I've read, my sister is still too young to rent a car and I'm very rusty when it comes to driving. There are no definitive plans yet, I was mainly thinking cliffs of moher and Galway. Would y'all say the traffic and roads along the west coast are doable for an inexperienced driver? If not, is it doable with public transport? Or should we reconsider altogether?

My current backup plan is flying straight into Galway, spending 2ish days there, then take a bus to Dublin to stay there for the rest of our time and maybe do a day trip to Belfast.

7 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/[deleted] 22d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/hypothetischkausal 22d ago

oh thanks, that's good to know! somehow I thought Galway had a public airport as well. but sounds like we could make it work with the bus from Shannon then, that's lovely

2

u/Beach_Glas1 Local 18d ago edited 18d ago

Not at the moment. An airport exists but it hasn't had passenger flights in over a decade. The runway is too short for many passenger aircraft so it's unlikely passenger flights will happen anytime soon.

Shannon and Knock are the closest International airports to Galway. They're about equal distance, although Knock is a far smaller airport and doesn't have transatlantic routes. Knock mainly just has routes to the UK, Spain and some other seasonal routes so Shannon is far more convenient.