Heritage Sites
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-11
============================================================

Louis O'Hara (SF), Galway East

I want to acknowledge the work of the OPW locally as well. The Minister of State mentioned the number of visitors visiting the sites. I had a parliamentary question recently and the response told me that in the region of 15,000 people visit Athenry Castle every year. That paints an overall picture for the number of visitors coming to the town but the same number of people would visit Galway city or Connemara on one weekend. We can do a lot better in Athenry in terms of the number of people visiting. I take the Minister of State's point about safety and maintenance of the structure and so on. However, I would ask that a particular effort be made around the promotion of that service being available to people, in that they can access this site because it is an iconic landmark, as I mentioned.
I ask the Minister of State to comment on the opening season for the castle. It is a missed opportunity that from November to March it is closed. There is a lot of great work going on locally. Galway County Council has plans for a heritage trail, heritage event spaces and a River Clarin walkway. Great efforts are being made to enhance our tourism offering but we need all the stakeholders coming together to push this forward and the OPW is an important part of it.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-11