About Must Do In Ireland

What's the craic, I'm Cormac, and I'm the creator of Must Do In Ireland.

I'm from just outside Trim, a historic town in County Meath. It's best known for Trim Castle, the largest Norman castle in Ireland — you might recognise it from the movie Braveheart — and it sits in the Boyne Valley, home to Newgrange, a passage tomb older than the Pyramids and Stonehenge. So I grew up surrounded by the kind of history most people cross the country to see.

From family road trips as a child to solo adventures as an adult, I've been exploring every corner of Ireland for as long as I can remember. Over the years, I've driven the country's coastal routes more times than I can count — deeply exploring the West and Southwest, tracing the roads from Mayo and Sligo all the way down through Galway, Clare, Kerry and Cork.

Why I built this

Planning a trip to Ireland can be genuinely overwhelming. Search for almost anything and you're met with endless top-ten lists, contradictory advice, and "ultimate guides" that leave you more confused than when you started. Most people don't want all of that. They want straight answers to a few simple questions: where should we base ourselves, what's the driving actually like, and is this place worth the time?

So I set out to make something simpler — one place with honest, first-hand recommendations, written the way I'd explain it to a friend who was coming to visit.

It's early days, and I'm still building it out, adding places and photographs as I go. Most of the photos are my own, taken on location, with more of my own work replacing the rest as the site grows. They're shot in the real Irish weather, too — which is why not every sky is blue. I'd rather show you the country as it actually is.

The one thing I'd tell anyone

Base yourself, and slow down. Ireland looks small on a map and feels much bigger on the road. Rather than racing to see everything in a few days, pick two or three good towns, stay a few nights in each, and explore outward from there. You'll see far more of the real Ireland by trying to see less of it.

A few places I love

• Connemara and the Sky Road — where the mountains meet the sea in Galway. Catch it at the right moment and there's nowhere quite like it.
• The Sligo coast — quietly one of the best stretches of the Wild Atlantic Way, and often skipped by people heading straight for Donegal.
• Dingle — the drive out along Slea Head is as good as coastal Ireland gets, and the town itself is one of the best spots in the country for a night out and a bite to eat.

A note on the links

Some of the accommodation and booking links on the site are affiliate links. They cost you nothing extra, and the small commission helps keep the site running and the guides free. I only ever point to places I'd happily use myself.

If you're planning a trip, I hope this takes some of the stress out of it. And if you get stuck, just reply to any of my emails — I read every one.

Sin é,
Cormac