86% of Irish bathing waters achieved Excellent quality, with Mayo hosting over a quarter of all monitored sites
Why this matters
This follows national reporting showing 98% of sites met minimum standards in 2025, but almost half experienced temporary closures or warnings, mainly linked to heavy rainfall and wastewater overflows. Mayo's beaches reported excellent standards, underscoring the county's significance as a key tourism and bathing water destination in the west.
Excellent quality accounted for 86% of current annual water quality classifications across all 50 monitored bathing sites, with 92% achieving Excellent in the previous year (2024)
Mayo contained 28% of all bathing sites (14 of 50), making it the county with the highest concentration of monitored beaches and lakes
Nearly all beaches (46 of 50) were identified as facing short-term pollution risk, indicating vulnerability to temporary water quality deterioration despite the generally high ratings
Just 7 sites failed to achieve Excellent quality in 2025: 6 were rated Good and 1 Sufficient, though all remained safe for swimming under EU standards
'Excellent Quality' accounts for 92% of all Year1 Annual Water Quality Classification values (46 of 50).View underlying data
Category
Value
Excellent Quality
46
Good Quality
2
Sufficient Quality
1
Not classified
1
'Excellent Quality' accounts for 90% of all Year2 Annual Water Quality Classification values (45 of 50).View underlying data
Category
Value
Excellent Quality
45
Good Quality
4
Poor Quality
1
'Excellent Quality' accounts for 90% of all Year3 Annual Water Quality Classification values (45 of 50).View underlying data
Category
Value
Excellent Quality
45
Good Quality
4
Poor Quality
1
A caveat worth knowing: This dataset represents locations monitored during the official bathing season (June to mid-September) and does not capture all potential bathing areas in Ireland or year-round water quality conditions
API endpoint used: https://data.epa.ie/bw/api/v1/locations
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Selected automatically — interestingness score 65/100
(has a time dimension, multiple numeric fields, and/or a categorical breakdown;
see the project's scoring method for details).
Published 2026-10-19T12:22:44.073627+00:00.
Generated automatically by Ireland Open Data Analyst — every quantitative claim above
was checked against a computed value before publishing.