With St. Patrick’s Day here, now is the perfect time to celebrate Irish culture and heritage. This year, we’re looking beyond pubs, parties, and parades to mark this moment in a more thoughtful, slightly different way. After all, the 17th of March is technically a feast day and Ireland is of course a lush and verdant land, a place that boasts quality food and drink. With this in mind, it makes sense to stop and savour this moment through the bounty of the island and — if you read our recently published tourism trends eBook — even more sense once you realise that agritourism is one of the industry’s biggest themes for 2025.
But even if you didn’t, it’s time to take this year’s celebrations at a more measured pace, moving from farm to table to explore how destinations across the Emerald Isle are using their bounty to appeal to visitors looking for a slower, more thoughtful kind of experience.
A snapshot of the value of tourism in Ireland
Good things take time and this is why — before diving into how agritourism is unfolding within the Irish market — we’re stepping back to get a quick sense of what tourism means to the island at large. According to a report issued by the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation (ITIC), the story of the Irish travel market in 2024 was one of resilience, with overseas visitors increasing by 6.7% on 2023 figures to a total of 6.6 million. The organisation reports that, while the outlook for 2025 is uncertain, “Tourism showcases the best of Ireland to an international audience and the domestic market ... and it provides wealth and employment across all parts of Ireland.”
Fáilte: Ireland through food and drink
With those thoughts in mind, it’s clear that organisations across Ireland are using food and drink as a tool to help them widen their reach and appeal. For example, as a theme, food and drink features heavily within the Spring 2025 Campaign of Simpleview client Tourism Northern Ireland (TNI). Yet more than simple roundups of where to eat and drink, we notice that TNI — in common with many other of our Irish clients — is building a host of comprehensive and interactive experiences to take visitors on a journey from farm to fork. Food unites visitors across all demographics. After all, sampling local fare is yet another way of experiencing Irish culture, which is precisely where the concept of agritourism comes into play.
The many ways of agritourism in Ireland
Everyone eats, but there are those always eager to make a deeper, more profound connection between the food on their plate and their new surroundings. Agritourism — which enables visitors to truly experience the provenance of a destination’s food and drink — is yet another angle on the wider theme of sustainable travel. For those within the industry, agritourism takes on many different forms, from conventional farm stays and unique harvest festivals to hands-on activities like cheesemaking or grape harvesting.
While every destination has a different take on agritourism (or food tourism in general), we at Simpleview note that food experiences are playing an ever-more important role in the wider offering of many of our Irish clients. For example, Discover Kerry has a vast range of food experiences, breweries and distilleries available for visitors to search and explore, and TNI has created a page to highlight its comprehensive range of distillery and brewery tours, ensuring that — from Armagh to Tyrone — visitors can top-up their glasses with the best that Northern Ireland has to offer. Many of our Irish clients have also created content to highlight one-of-a-kind food experiences to showcase the best that their destinations have to offer. From urban farms and creameries in Kerry to food tours along Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coastal Route to a full-on goat cheese experience in Derry, there’s something to tickle everyone’s tastebuds.
And so — with St. Patrick’s Day almost upon us — now is exactly the moment to not just celebrate the best of Irish food and drink, but to stop and savour what the trend of agritourism has to offer visitors and destinations across the Emerald Isle.
