St Brigid’s Day spring campaign

2024 marks 1,500 years since the death of St Brigid, one of Ireland’s three patron saints who is traditionally commemorated each year on 1st February. For the first time ever, Tourism Ireland rolled out a campaign to leverage St Brigid’s Day and celebrate spring as our ‘season of green’. Tourism Ireland aims to extend the traditional tourism season and raise awareness of the island of Ireland as a great spring holiday destination. 

One of the main elements of the campaign was a new 60-second video highlighting Brigid 1500, a festival in Kildare which celebrates the impact of St Brigid. The video featured an interview with Sonya Kavanagh, founder of Brigid 1500, who discussed Brigid's legacy, the significance of Imbolc and the start of spring in Ireland. It showcased the lush greenery of Ireland in spring – highlighting our island’s natural beauty awakening after winter. 

The video was shared via a paid media campaign in Great Britain and organically with our followers on social media in other markets. In total, 24 million opportunities to see the video were generated on social and digital channels around St Brigid’s Day.

Press and influencer activity

Tourism Ireland also undertook an extensive programme of other activity to use St Brigid as a ‘hook’ to inspire people to visit the island of Ireland in the spring. These were some of the highlights:

• A series of interviews with actress Siobhán McSweeney on regional BBC radio stations across Britain on 1st February, talking about St Brigid and springtime in Ireland. The interviews aired on 11 different radio stations, reaching 10.3 million listeners across Great Britain.
  
  
• Tourism Ireland in London arranged for St Brigid and Kildare to feature in an episode of the popular Wander Women travel podcast, which has had 7,000 downloads to date. Tourism Ireland also arranged for Downpatrick, Kildare and St Brigid to feature in an episode of the Armchair Explorer podcast (published in March), which has had around 6,000 downloads to date.
  
  
• Tourism Ireland also pitched St Brigid’s Day to international media, resulting in the story featuring our materials being picked up 617 times by international media, reaching millions.
  Click here to read an example of an article which appeared in The Guardian.
  
  
• Four popular British influencers visited Kildare and this year’s Brigid 1500 festival. Results included 39 posts on social media, with a reach of 843,000 and 414,000 engagements.
  
  

On International Women’s Day we shared a new video featuring musician Róisín Berkeley on our social channels – showcasing our wonderful female talent against a backdrop of green springtime Ireland.