Cliffs of Moher & the Burren Mid-range
Seafood chowder and brown bread everywhere along this coast, and Doolin's pubs cook while the music plays. The Burren Smokehouse at Lisdoonvarna is worth a stop.
Budget travel in Ireland
What a visitor's money does in Ireland: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Expensive average across 5 guides · 5 is very cheap
Money
Euro (EUR) · 1 EUR = 1.15 USD · 1 EUR = 0.86 GBP
Cards and contactless everywhere, including the buses in Dublin. Pubs in small towns sometimes still want cash, and a round is bought in turn rather than split.
ATMs
Avoid: the machines in Doolin, of which there is essentially one
Use: AIB, Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB
Draw in Ennis or Lahinch. Doolin’s pubs take cards now, but the ferry and the parking do not always.
Getting around
A short ride in Cliffs of Moher & the Burren: €8–14 across town — middling
Identical, because they are the same metered taxis. The app saves the wait, not the fare.
City by city, cheapest first
Killarney & the Ring of Kerry Mid-range
Seafood on the coast — Kenmare and Portmagee — and pub food inland. Killarney has more restaurants than a town this size should and the good ones book up in July.
Cork & Kinsale Mid-range
The English Market is the reason food people come to Cork — buttered eggs, drisheen, and a restaurant upstairs looking down on it. Kinsale calls itself the gourmet capital of Ireland and mostly gets away with it.
Galway Expensive
Galway Bay oysters, with a festival for them in September. Seafood chowder in any pub worth the name, brown soda bread with it, and Connemara lamb. The city has an unusually good food market on Saturdays behind St Nicholas’ church.
Dublin Expensive
Dublin has quietly become good: seafood from Howth, the Fumbally and the market cafés, and a bakery scene that would surprise anyone who last came in 2005. A proper pint of Guinness is poured in two parts and takes two minutes — if it arrives in one, it was not.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
The guides in Ireland
Cliffs of Moher & the BurrenIrelandTwo hundred metres of sheer Atlantic cliff, and behind them a limestone desert with Mediterranean flowers in it
DublinIrelandA small capital with a very large literature, and a pub for every page of it
GalwayIrelandA small city that plays music every night of the week, on the edge of the wildest coast in Ireland
Killarney & the Ring of KerryIrelandLakes under sandstone mountains, a national park you can walk into from the town, and the most driven road in Ireland around it
Cork & KinsaleIrelandIreland's second city, built on an island in a river, with a food town and a harbour twenty minutes away