The Galway Races

Galway Races dates: 2026, 2027 and 2028

The festival always opens on the last Monday of July and runs seven days, so the dates follow from the calendar. The 2026 festival ran from Monday 27 July 2026 to 2 August 2026, with the Galway Plate on Wednesday 29 July 2026 and the Galway Hurdle and Ladies' Day on Thursday 30 July 2026. The 2027 festival runs from Monday 26 July 2027 to 1 August 2027: the Plate on Wednesday 28 July 2027, the Hurdle and Ladies' Day on Thursday 29 July 2027. In 2028 it runs from Monday 31 July 2028 to 6 August 2028, with the Plate on 2 August 2028 and the Hurdle on 3 August 2028. These dates are worked out from the last-Monday rule; the racecourse publishes the confirmed programme, and the autumn meetings in September and October are fixed separately.

From two days to seven

The first festival at Ballybrit was a two-day meeting that opened on Tuesday 17 August 1869. It grew slowly and then quickly: three days in 1959, four in 1971, five in 1974, six in 1982 and seven in 1999. The pub under the Corrib Stand, built in 1955, was for many years the longest bar in the world; the Millennium Stand replaced it in 1999, and the Killanin Stand took the place of the old west stand in 2007. On the fourth day of the festival a meeting used to be held at Tuam, until that course closed in 1973.

There are smaller meetings at Ballybrit in September and October, but the summer festival is the one that matters, with more than 150,000 people through the gates. In 2020 the committee announced on 21 April that the festival planned for 27 July to 2 August would be affected by the pandemic.

The races in song and verse

W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called At Galway Races. The folk song of the same name was made popular by the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains and the Dubliners, turned up on the JSD Band's Travelling Days and the Kreellers' Sixth and Porter, and makes up the last third of the Pogues' Medley on If I Should Fall from Grace with God, after The Recruiting Sergeant and an instrumental Rocky Road to Dublin. In 2009 TG4 broadcast a comedy series, Rásaí na Gaillimhe, set during race week.

Getting to Ballybrit

The racecourse lies east of the city beside the N6, a few kilometres from Eyre Square; during the festival the roads around it are slow and the buses and taxis from the centre are the sensible way out. The model on this page shows the city centre; the pubs and hotels pinned on it have their own pages with hours.