If Cape Town in 2028 is the long-haul option, here is the one you can reach on a short flight – and it is not going to a capital city. EuroPride 2028 is heading to the West of Ireland.
Contents
🗓️ The Dates
Friday 4 to Sunday 13 August 2028 – ten days, running across Clare and Limerick.
🇮🇪 Two Counties, One Pride
This is the interesting part. EuroPride usually lands in a big European capital – Dublin would have been the obvious Irish pick. Instead the bid came jointly from Limerick LGBTQ+ Pride and The Outing Winter Pride Festival, in association with QuareClare, and it deliberately puts a major international event into a largely rural region.
The pitch is “Two Counties, One Pride”: the historic streets of Limerick city paired with the Wild Atlantic Way coastline of Clare. The organisers frame it as giving visibility to smaller Prides and rural LGBTQ+ communities rather than concentrating everything in a capital – a genuinely different proposition from the usual EuroPride host.
Ireland has form here: it was the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. As Panti Bliss puts it on the bid site, reflecting on leaving Ireland years earlier – “homosexuality was still a crime… I technically could have gone to prison.” The distance travelled is a large part of the story being told.
✈️ Getting There
This is where the rural setting stops being a problem. The host region sits about 20 minutes from Shannon International Airport, which takes direct flights from the UK, mainland Europe and North America. For anyone coming from Amsterdam it is a short hop, and considerably less effort than most EuroPride host cities.
Organisers say they are working with local and national transport partners on links between the two counties – worth watching, because Clare and Limerick are not a single walkable festival site the way Amsterdam or Dublin would be.
🌊 Make It a Road Trip
Honestly, the location is the selling point. If you are flying into Shannon for Pride anyway, the Wild Atlantic Way starts on the doorstep – the Cliffs of Moher, the Burren and the whole Atlantic coast road are right there.
We have written about that drive before in The Ultimate Wild Atlantic Way Adventure, and if you are extending the trip eastward, our guide to Dublin’s queer nightlife and bars covers the other end of the country.
🌐 The Official Source
Details are still thin this far out – no programme, no tickets. The organisers are running a mailing list at europrideireland.ie, which will carry announcements as they come.
We will update this page as the picture fills in.