Accessibility Tours Ireland

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Accessibility Tours Ireland was founded by Bob McAuliffe as part of the About Ireland Taxi Tours Family with a simple but powerful vision:
to make Ireland’s beauty, culture, and history accessible to everyone.

Why Hub Touring with About Ireland Taxi Tours Is a Better Way to See IrelandMost tour companies move you to a new hotel ...
23/08/2026

Why Hub Touring with About Ireland Taxi Tours Is a Better Way to See Ireland
Most tour companies move you to a new hotel every night. Pack up, drive, unpack, repeat. It sounds efficient, it is but does it work better for you?
Our hub system works better for everybody. But it makes the biggest difference for wheelchair users, elderly clients, and people with reduced mobility.
At About Ireland Taxi Tours, we do things differently simply because it works better for you. Yes clients stay in a small number of base locations rather that crisscrossing Ireland , and we handle the transfer tours in between and the day tours while you’re there.
Here are just a few reasons why that works better:

No packing and unpacking every night. For any traveller that’s a relief. For a wheelchair user, it removes a real physical burden — you’re not re-navigating an unfamiliar accessible bathroom or room layout every single day.

A slower pace, more time to actually experience where you are. Fewer travel days means more days actually exploring the area and more time on the ground, not just getting somewhere. For clients with reduced mobility, that also means less fatigue.

Better hotel rates for multi-night stays. Savings that go straight back into the tour experience.
Fewer accessibility unknowns. You solve the room once, not every 24 hours.
And here’s the one that really matters to our accessible clients : With wheelchair tours because one of our driver’s personally handles the luggage transfer to the next hotel, they’re on-site before the client arrives. That means the room gets checked in person — roll-in shower, doorways, bed height — before your bags ever go in, and long before you get there. No arriving to find out the “accessible room” isn’t. It’s quality control that simply doesn’t exist in the standard one-night-hotel-hop model as you always arrive after most rooms are already allocated. We also work with away from it all self catering places like Lough Sallagh lodges in Longford which are accessible

We don’t just show you Ireland, we connect you to it.

This is not a survey or a post but a question that we are asking We know and understand that many electric wheelchairs a...
13/08/2026

This is not a survey or a post but a question that we are asking
We know and understand that many electric wheelchairs are custom designed for the user, however most travel wheelchairs are universal in designs. We know for many wheelchair users, handing your mobility aid over to airport baggage handlers can be a genuinely worrying moment. Too often chairs come out damaged at the other end, and that can take away your independence for the whole trip.
We have thought about what that means for you. Maybe you’ve put off a trip you’d love to take because you just don’t trust the airline to look after your wheelchair. In the past a holiday’s been cut short, or you spent more time worried than relaxed, because a hotel wasn’t really accessible or an attraction had steps nobody warned you about. A holiday should be something you can fully relax into — not something you have to brace yourself for.
This is one of the reasons why we have moved to a hub-based touring approach. Instead of packing up and moving to a new hotel every night, we base you in a small number of comfortable hub locations and take you out to explore the surrounding areas from there. Less time on the road, less disruption, less packing and unpacking and much more time actually enjoying the place you’ve come to see.
We are now also thinking about going one step further. We are looking at adding a new service, the ability to book either an electric wheelchair or a Power Wheel attachment for your manual wheelchair through us, that will be ready and waiting for you when you land right now this is just an idea as there are many issues like liability insurance to resolve before we Cou move forward
This is the electric wheelchair we are considering:
• Max loading capacity: 440 lbs • Seat width: 18” • Net weight: 33 lbs (without battery) • Running distance: up to 12 miles
That means you could leave your own valuable mobility aid safely at home, bring a lighter manual wheelchair instead, and still have full powered mobility waiting for you when you get here — one less worry, so you can just focus on enjoying your holiday.
Let us know your thoughts — it will help us decide if this is a service people would want to use.

08/08/2026

What does hub touring actually mean?

For years the conventional way of touring Ireland has been the same. Get up in the morning, pack your bags, get in the vehicle, get on the road. See some sites, have lunch, see some more sites, arrive at your hotel, unpack, have dinner, maybe get down to the local pub for some traditional music. Then do it all again the next day, for seven days straight, and you never really give yourself the time to stop, relax and actually experience Ireland.

I'll be upfront about this. Our hub system won't get you round every one of the top 10 tourist sites in Ireland. But then most tours don't manage that either, once you're outside Dublin you're normally looking at 7 or 8 of them at best.

What the hub system gives you is the chance to experience Ireland at a relaxed pace, not just see it through the window on the way to the next must see spot.

The important part is choosing the area of Ireland you want to explore, and that doesn't always mean having a driver guide with you every day. Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Galway, Limerick, Killarney, Cork, Waterford and Kilkenny are all easy enough to explore for a day on your own. Just bear in mind some of them have cobbled streets that can be uneven and tricky for a wheelchair to get around.

There are also some fabulous places to stay away from the hustle and bustle of the big towns and cities. Bramley House in Northern Ireland is a fully accessible guesthouse in a rural setting, and Inchydoney Island Hotel and Spa in West Cork is a perfect place to just take a few days and chill out away from all the usual tourist hustle.

Picking the right place for you isn't always easy, that's why we're happy to sit down and help you work through the different dates and itineraries available from each place. It takes time but it's time well spent, and planning can honestly be half the fun of a holiday.

The advantage of the hub system for everybody is that it's simple. Less packing and unpacking. A more relaxed pace. Going back to a restaurant you enjoyed rather than a different one every night. And a lot of accommodation providers are happy to offer a discount for people staying multiple nights. If you're somewhere you don't need a driver guide every day that saves you money too, since local taxi rates are usually a good bit less than inter location transfers.

On the inter location transfers, for a wheelchair user a lot of the time luggage taking up space in the vehicle is an issue. Not just for them, for me too, I just don't think it's right and it genuinely bothers me. So yes there's an added cost to running a separate vehicle to move the luggage direct from one location to the next, but doing it that way keeps the overall cost down. What it means for you is you travel in comfort knowing your luggage will be there waiting when you arrive. The other advantage is the transfer driver will get to the hotel ahead of you and confirm the room number, making sure it's the accessible room you booked.

By using local professional taxi drivers as our driver guides you get to relax and draw on their local knowledge, the restaurants, the bars, the hidden gems most tour companies just drive straight past. Because he's local he can open doors for you that a guide from outside the area just can't. A guide based in Cork would struggle to connect you in any real way with Mayo, or with Wicklow. That's the strength of the system.

There's another side to it too. Because you're meeting multiple drivers along the way, you get multiple perspectives. Every driver has lived a different life, grown up with a different experience of Ireland, has his own family history and his own connection to his area. That gives you a much richer insight into the country than any one guide ever could.

It’s not often I get out of the office and I get to explore Ireland again and have the pleasure of showcasing Ireland.La...
07/08/2026

It’s not often I get out of the office and I get to explore Ireland again and have the pleasure of showcasing Ireland.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of spending four days in Northern Ireland with my old friend Christy showing Julie and her mum the best that Northern Ireland has to offer from the moment we met up Christy the ladies were traced by his kindness, his knowledge his experience and the places he shared with us from Belfast to Derry along the causeway Rte what should have been an eight hour day turn into a trip of magical moments visiting nacho the joint causeway but hidden gems and secret places all along the coast to arrive in Derry the next morning well I can head off with the luggage because I wasn’t happy with luggage travelling in the vehicle with Julie her mum Christy took them on a tour of Derry city in the morning the world of Derry the Guild Hall the museum of free Derry they spent time everywhere with Christy telling them stories and sharing history and experiences all along the way meeting up with Christy and Julie up and Grianán Ailigh a wonderful stone Fort just outside of Derry where the views were absolutely stunning. This tour gave me a real life experience and an insight into what is really good about what we do, but also the things we need to do better,one of those things is definitely moving luggage separately on an accessible tour. I just cannot accept having luggage on somebody’s lap on the tour especially not if that person is a Wheelchair user.
Thank you to Julie and her mum for allowing me to add Christy to the Tour and thank you to Christy for making the days such a success. And thank you to Jenny for looking after everything else

05/08/2026

All-Ability Paddleboarding

04/08/2026

Accessible tourism is never straightforward when you’re running it day to day. There’s always something throwing a spanner in the works, and this year the one that keeps coming back at us, time and time again, is touring Ireland with luggage.

How do you move the luggage and the clients between locations at the same time without it turning into a mess? That’s the real question.

And I’ll say it straight out — I’m not having luggage piled in on top of clients who use wheelchairs. I don’t care That’s not good enough for me and it never will be.

So here’s the plan for next year. Fewer locations, longer stays in each one. Rather than hopping from town to town, we’re giving people more time to settle into a place, connect with it, and explore what’s around them. On the days where we genuinely can’t avoid an inter-city transfer, we’ll run two vehicles — one for the clients, one for the luggage. That’s it, that’s the solution.

Now, it does add cost on those transfer days, no getting away from that. But it’s not all one-way traffic. Fewer locations means more local day tours costing less than many inter location transfer tours, no packing up every second morning, no messing about. And hotels are usually well up for doing a deal when you’re booking multiple nights instead of one-night stopovers. So a good bit of that extra cost gets clawed back elsewhere.

Even on a recent tour with just two clients, this luggage issue came up again not a game changer for the client but it felt uncomfortable having luggage on the seats So it’s not a big group problem, it’s a planning problem — and the fix is in how you build the itinerary, not in asking someone to travel with a suitcase on their lap.

After finishing a wonderful tour with Julie and her mum of Northern Ireland on my way home, I decided to make one or two...
04/08/2026

After finishing a wonderful tour with Julie and her mum of Northern Ireland on my way home, I decided to make one or two stops on places that I wanted to visit just to check them out as to their accessibility And to see where they’re really worth visiting. To say I was pleasantly surprised by both my visit to Dun na Si heritage park and Kilbeggan Distillery would be an understatement both places are well including in your itinerary..
My only foot is that the wonderful café at Dun na Si is closed on a Monday and a Tuesday

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Travelling from Belfast to Derry today I saw a sign for Seamus Heaney’s home place visitors centre so I decided to stop ...
01/08/2026

Travelling from Belfast to Derry today I saw a sign for Seamus Heaney’s home place visitors centre so I decided to stop and enjoy a 30 minute visit. This turned into one of the most enjoyable hours
Looking for a hidden gem in Northern Ireland — somewhere off the usual tourist trail?

Add the Seamus Heaney HomePlace to your list. I hesitate to even call it a museum it’s a visitors centre with a difference — it's a tribute to one of the greatest Irish poets, and a place well worth visiting in its own right.

It's fully accessible, it has a lovely little café, and it's genuinely interactive and enjoyable. If you're travelling between Belfast and Derry and have already ticked off the Causeway and the other usual stops, don't treat this as an afterthought. It deserves a proper visit.

The best recommendation I can give: it's a place I'd happily return to again and again. You won't find the big tour buses here — just a quieter spot for anyone who appreciates great poetry great scenery and great literature.

An early morning walk around the Titanic experience area this morning just to get ready for the day. Belfast is busy get...
01/08/2026

An early morning walk around the Titanic experience area this morning just to get ready for the day. Belfast is busy getting ready for the All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil starting tomorrow

Address

Orchid Cottage
Glanworth
P51K6Y1

Opening Hours

Monday 9:30am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 9:30am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9:30am - 5:30pm
Thursday 9:30am - 5:30pm
Friday 9:30am - 5:30pm

Telephone

+353862352223

Website

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