Trips along the Howth Summit walk have almost quadrupled, data suggests

By the time the train got near the end of the line, it was clear that most passengers out of the city had been headed to Howth on Sunday.

Kesley Hopkins was with a group of five friends visiting from Boston. They were heading for the Cliff Walk, she said.

Howth has become more and more popular as a tourist attraction.

In 2024, people took 216,000 trips to the Howth Summit walk, show figures from Fingal County Council. Last year, that figure hit 936,000.

“And that's quite apart from the many people who come to Howth to never go beyond the harbor and the village area,” says Philip O’Connor, chair of the Howth Special Amenity Area Order (SAAO) Management Committee. 

“So like, this is .. 10 times what it was just five years ago,” he says. “It's one of the most visited places in Ireland.”

For the Howth SAAO Management Committee, that has presented a challenge. “This is not the Guinness Storehouse. When you overwork the cliffs, you actually make the place worse, not better,” says O’Connor.

Meanwhile, across the county, councillors for Dublin 15 have been pushing to set up a tourism group for their area to see if it is possible to disperse visitors a bit more evenly around Fingal. 

At a recent meeting, Labour Party Mary McCamley said that she had been to a tourism conference at the Crowne Plaza last autumn, and saw a presentation from the council on all they were doing. 

“Not mentioning Blanchardstown and Dublin 15 whatsoever,” she said.

Why now?

Below the Dart Station in Howth on Sunday, Mark Morrison, the manager of the Bloody Stream, always asks tourists how they ended up there.

“Their vibe is they come out here for maybe four or five hours from the city centre,” Morrison says. It’s advertised by their hotels, he says, who point them towards the Cliff Walk, and to head to the Bloody Stream afterwards. 

They come and do the Cliff Walk, grab a bite to eat or a pint and head back, he says. “And then, obviously, if we didn't get them on the way in, we get them on the way back, that's the nature of it.”

O’Connor says the two big changes are cheap flights and awareness of Howth through social media.

“You know, Italian people fly into Dublin for a long weekend or something. And through social media, they learn very fast that you can hop in the train, in half an hour, you're in this very pleasant place,” he says.

Down by the boats, Shane O’Doherty – who runs Howth Adventures – says he has felt bad about the impact of the massive visitor numbers.

“I actually, to some degree, I feel guilty about it,” he said.

Too many people can wear out the trails, and scare the birds, he says. “If there's too many people, it actually diminishes the kind of, the community of nature.”

He has tried to reinvest in the local community, he says, seeing it as a kind of “regenerative tourism”, giving locals summer jobs, doing free work with schools.

In general he said, the growth in visitors has been good for the businesses in Howth.

“The rising tide has floated all boats,” said O’Doherty. But even though he’s in the tourism industry himself, he said there can be too many people in Howth.

O’Connor says that the SAAO Management Committee has been taking measures too.

The council and committee put in new rope fencing surrounding the heather along the Cliff Walk, and they put in new signs alerting visitors about the seabirds and where they lay eggs on Ireland’s Eye.

“Ninety-nine point nine percent of people instinctively comply with the rope fencing — that always amazes me,” O’Connor said.

But as they put in more defences to protect from the steady tread of visitors, that has its own impact, he says. 

“You're putting in more fences, and you're putting in maintained paths and that, and it's gradually that is, of course, all gradually eroding the wilderness aspect of it,” he says.

“That's a compromise you have to do. It's a matter of trying to manage a place that has become extremely attractive to visitors,” said O’Connor.

Labour Party Councillor Brian McDonagh said the challenge is making Howth accessible to everyone.

“It's spectacular views. It's accessible by rail, by public transport, 45 minutes from Dublin … like it is a world-class, you know, destination in and of itself,” he said. 

So, he said, the council needs to manage the space. “We've invested a lot in trying to improve the paths, make it safer,” McDonagh said. 

A group of students speaking Italian pooled together just outside the door to a giftshop at the east side of Howth Market, sheltering under the entrance roof from the rain.

Inside the shop, Elaine Collins also put the increase in tourists to cheap flights from Europe, she says. 

Visitors from abroad used to be seasonal, mostly in the summer, she says.  “It's nearly every weekend now,” Collins said.

But they count on that now, she says. They feel it when the Dart has gone down for work during bank holiday weekends, she says. 

Joan Hopkins, a Social Democrats councillor, says she has wondered about the changes that Howth has undergone in recent times, and how the kind of tourism has impacted the town.

Advertising is very much around daytrips, she says. “It's very much, you know, have a bag of chips, do the Cliff Walk, you know, and then go home, kind of thing.”

She wonders whether encouraging fewer people to come and stay longer would be more sustainable, she says. Although many hotels that used to be in Howth are gone and replaced by short-term lets, she said.

O’Doherty says he would like to see fewer, more engaged tourists.

“Who actually are genuinely here for the wilderness, biodiversity, habitats and culture,” he said. “Which are often things that are most, kind of like, apparent and resonant, when there isn't 100 other people beside you.”

What’s the strategy?

In March 2024, Fingal County Council launched a new tourism strategy which runs until 2029. It looks to push the county as a destination, noting the importance of tourism for jobs.

Most of the attractions that it logs are in coastal areas of the county.

At the recent meeting of the Blanchardstown-Mulhuddart-Castleknock-Ongar Area Committee, Labour Councillor Mary McCamley said she had noticed a lack of attention to Dublin 15. 

At a tourism conference last year, residents had come over to her to say it was ridiculous how they hadn’t been mentioned, she says. Council officials suggested to McCamley that she get a tourism group together for the area. 

So, she put forward a motion at the area committee meeting, asking that Fingal’s chief executive engage with people with a view to setting up a dedicated Dublin 15 tourism group.

She got a response saying that the council’s tourism development unit had a framework for engaging with groups on the tourism strategy and the county’s food and drink strategy. 

As part of that, it was supporting local stakeholders to set up a Dublin 15 group to drive tourism in the area, it said.

McCamley said she could have done with more detail in that written response. “Is there a committee being started? Where will it meet? When will it meet?”

“There is a great deal of potential there,” said John Walsh, the Labour Party councillor – pointing to Shackleton Mill.

“Without a doubt, we are up against it,” says Sinn Féin Councillor Angela Donnelly. “We don’t have a beach. They have gorgeous beaches, they have demesnes.”

But she has scratched her head at the degree to which Dublin 15 hasn’t featured in the tourism strategy, she says. 

She remembered a social media campaign last year inviting people to Fingal and it was all the beaches and the walks, she says. “Blanchardstown got an honorary member. The shopping centre.”

Ciarán Staunton, an administrator with the council, said there had been a tourism group pulled together in Dublin 15, but it seemed to run out of steam unfortunately. 

They do acknowledge the need for a local tourism group, and to support that, and are doing that, he said.

Dublin 15 does offer a different tourism product to the east, he says. 

“It does offer more on the corporate tourism side, and it does offer more on the longer walkways,” he said, citing the Royal Canal and the Liffey Valley and the Castleknock historic trail.

Councillors for the coastal areas were mixed in how much they think the success of tourism in Howth is down to council promotion and how much it is down to the beaches and cliffs.

"There are other beautiful places that Fingal could be promoting more, you know, to take the pressure off,” said Hopkins, the Social Democrats councillor. But also, she said with a laugh, Howth is special.

Yes, said Labour Councillor Brian McDonagh, it is hard to replicate Howth’s success elsewhere, because it’s special.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.