Our beaches.ie website shares the latest information we have on water quality and other information at the moment you search for it for 204 beaches. You can use beaches.ie on your smartphone, ipad, laptop or desktop to access the site ‘on the go’ or at home. So before you head to the beach, find out what the latest water quality is at your favourite beach and make sure there are no reported swim restrictions. Having access to this information allows you to make an informed decision about which beach you will go to for a swim or to spend the day with your family and friends. You can also follow us @EPABeaches.
The beaches.ie website currently provides information on 147 identified beaches (monitored and managed under the Bathing Water Quality Regulations) and 57 other monitored beaches. The site was developed and is maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency and is a collaboration with the Local Authorities and the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government.
As most people go to their nearest beach, the ‘Home’ page displays beaches near you and their water quality if you have your geolocation turned on. Beaches near you display where they have excellent, good or sufficient water quality and do not have a reported swim restriction. Selecting a beach brings you to its beach page with more beach related information such as available amenities, weather, tides, historical water quality results, photos, etc. Also, so you are informed of any beaches that may be experiencing issues around the country, all beaches with reported swim restriction are displayed on the Home page.
If you are curious about the water quality of a particular beach, looking for new beaches to visit while holidaying or need to locate a beach with certain amenities such as a beach wheelchair service, then you can use our ‘Find a Beach’ search and filter functionality. You can search for a particular beach, search by county or simply press ‘GO’ to see the latest water quality of 204 beaches. If you need to narrow your search or are looking for particular beach aspects then you can use the filter to find beaches that have your selected amenities and water quality, and select whether beach has a blue flag/green coast or swim restriction or not. Selecting a beach brings you to its beach page and a lot more information.
The Beach page gives you a lot of information about the beach, including latest water quality and historical water quality results; when a swim restriction is in place gives information on the cause of the incident and the restriction notice (for main beaches only); annual water quality rating of the beach based on four years results (for main beaches only); available beach amenities such as toilets, accessibility, first aid etc.; current weather and three day forecast, tidal information, photos, etc. You can also view for the main beaches their bathing water profile which provides information on potential pressures and risks affecting water quality. You can save and unsave a beach as a ‘favourite beach’ by selecting and deselecting the heart icon.
You may have a number of beaches that are your favourites. For easy access to their beach information you can set up your own set of favourite beaches that you can access from the Favourites page. Saving and unsaving beaches as favourites is easy and is done in the beach pages by selecting and deselecting the heart icon.
You can find articles under the ‘Love Your Beach’, ‘Beach Safety’ and ‘Water Quality’ areas of the Beach Guide. The number of articles will grow over time and we are inviting our stakeholders to submit articles that would be of interest and informative to you and other beach users. You can let us know, by using our feedback form on the Contacts page, about other articles you would like in our Beach Guide and if you would like to provide an article about how you #LoveYour Beach.
You can report a missing ringbuoy by linking to and reporting it on the ringbuoy.ie website. You can report an environmental issue via the ‘See it’ Say it’ app. It is hoped, in the future, to increase the types of issues that can be reported from beaches.ie.
We hope you find beaches.ie useful and we welcome your feedback which you can send via our feedback form. You can find contact details for the local authorities and links to key organisations in the marine environment.
Our beaches.ie is a truly collaborative initiative with the local authorities. The local authorities are responsible for monitoring our beaches, and during the summer months, these 18 local authorities report, via an EPA information system, the water quality results for each sample tested which are then automatically updated in beaches.ie. The local authorities are also responsible for managing our beaches and, for 147 of our main beaches, they report, via an EPA information system, on incidents arising at these beaches during the summer months. We commend the local authorities on their continued effort to making bathing water quality information available in a timely manner and their support for the beaches.ie initiative.
We wish to thank the Marine Institute and Met Éireann for their help in providing valuable beach information for beaches.ie and their commitment to making their information accessible to other stakeholders. The Marine Institute, as the state agency responsible for marine research and development, provides the tidal information using the location coordinates of the beaches in their modelling process. Met Éireann, as the national meteorological service, provides current weather and three day weather forecasts for each of the beach locations.
Beaches.ie has regular updates on bathing water quality during the bathing season, which runs from 1 June to 15 September.
Beaches.ie is automatically updated hourly between 7am and 7pm, seven days a week. This allows any new or updated information reported by the local authorities to the EPA to be made publicly available quickly.
To ensure the most up-to-date information is displayed on our website, you may need to refresh your browser and clear your cache.
The beaches.ie website is optimized for and works best with Internet Explorer 10 or higher, Google Chrome and Safari 8 or higher. We use Bootstrap to resize the site for different devices, screen sizes and browsers. Bootstrap is built to work best in the latest desktop and mobile browsers. Further details are on the Bootstrap website.
Our data is shared via a public Web API https://data.epa.ie/api-list/bathing-water-open-data/.