Galway Girl: two songs, one city
Ask a busker on Shop Street for Galway Girl and you had better say which one. Steve Earle's, about a black-haired, blue-eyed girl he met in the city, has been sung in every pub from Salthill to the Long Walk since 2000 and went to number one for Mundy and Sharon Shannon in 2008. Ed Sheeran's, a different song with the same name, was the third single from his album ÷ in 2017, topped the Irish chart and was shot on a camera strapped to his chest as he walked the town with Saoirse Ronan.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
The Quays, Róisín Dubh, Tigh Neachtain on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
Steve Earle, 2000
Earle wrote the song as The Galway Girl about Joyce Redmond, from Howth, whom he met in Galway; she plays bodhrán on his recording with Sharon Shannon, released on Transcendental Blues in 2000. It tells a semi-autobiographical story and names Salthill and the Long Walk. Mundy's cover with Shannon reached number one in Ireland in April 2008, stayed five weeks, was the biggest-selling download and highest-selling single in the country that year and won at the Meteor Awards; he also cut an Irish-language version, Cailín na Gaillimhe. Gerard Butler sings it to Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You, and Earle performed it himself as a street musician in Treme. Celtic Thunder, Johnny Logan, the High Kings and dozens of others have recorded it.
Ed Sheeran, 2017
Sheeran wrote his Galway Girl with the Irish folk band Beoga, folding in part of their tune Minute 5, at his house in Suffolk with Foy Vance, Johnny McDaid and Amy Wadge; it is in F sharp minor at 100 beats per minute. He said his label fought to keep it off the album because folk music was not cool, and he told them it would be enormous because 400 million people in the world say they are Irish. Announced on St Patrick's Day, 17 March 2017, it charted in 31 countries, went to number one in Ireland, Iceland, Slovenia and Slovakia, number two in Britain behind Shape of You, and sold 1.2 million combined units in the UK by that September. The video, shot on 11 April 2017 with Sheeran filming himself on a body-mounted rig, follows him from a Dublin concert into a Galway bar where Saoirse Ronan is dancing on a table, through darts, tattoos and the streets of the city. A Northern Irish singer, Ritchie Remo, mashed the two songs together as Galway Girls the same month.
Where the songs happen
Salthill and the Long Walk, the row of houses along the harbour by the Claddagh, are the places in Earle's lyric, and Sheeran's video roams the streets around Shop Street and the West End. The model on this page pins the Spanish Arch, the Claddagh and the pubs of the Latin Quarter; the Salthill and Claddagh guides cover the ground.
Questions people ask
Who wrote Galway Girl?
Who is the Galway Girl in Steve Earle's song?
Where was Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl video filmed?
Which version of Galway Girl was number one?
Written from Wikipedia, "Galway Girl (Steve Earle song)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.