Getting around NOC
Ireland West Airport exists because a parish priest refused to accept that a "foggy, boggy hill" in rural County Mayo could not fly. In the early 1980s Monsignor James Horan, parish priest of Knock, set out to connect the West of Ireland to the world so pilgrims could reach Knock Shrine — telling RTE News in 1981 that the Department of Transport had better not hear about it, because there was no money yet, only the hope of finding it "next week, or the week after". The airport opened in 1986, and the idea never really let go of it: the Horan Airport Trust, co-owner alongside seven local authorities since 2017, still seats the parish priest of Knock Shrine and the Archbishop of Tuam as trustees, and every year Joe Walsh Tours and Marian Pilgrimages still fly chartered pilgrims out of the same terminal to Lourdes and Medjugorje. Today it is Ireland's fourth-largest airport, carrying a record 945,862 passengers in 2025 (Central Statistics Office, +14% on 2024) on Aer Lingus and Ryanair's scheduled network to 20-plus destinations, plus those seasonal pilgrim charters. One terminal handles all of it, on the N17 halfway between Galway and Sligo, with a multi-faith prayer room upstairs and — since a recent change to Irish security rules — no more squeezing liquids into a 100ml bag: containers up to 2 litres now go straight through the scanner.
