By Rodger Morrow, Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business
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There was a time—not so very long ago in the grand Beaver County tradition of exaggerating distance—when Ireland felt roughly as far away as the moon, or at least as distant as Harrisburg on a bad day. You needed maps, layovers, patience, and a certain emotional preparedness for airline food that tasted like damp cardboard. Now, thanks to Aer Lingus and a bit of stubborn Western Pennsylvania persistence, Ireland is officially one short transatlantic hop away.
Starting May 25, 2026, you’ll be able to leave Pittsburgh International Airport at a civilized-enough 8:40 p.m., fall asleep somewhere over Newfoundland, and wake up seven hours later at 8:40 a.m. in Dublin—just in time for a proper breakfast and, if you’re doing it right, the planning stages of your first Guinness. The return trip leaves Dublin at 4:10 p.m. and gets you back to Pittsburgh by 7 p.m., which means you can theoretically have bangers and mash for lunch and still make it home in time to let the dog out.
The flights will run four times a week—Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays—skipping only January and February, which is sensible because even the Irish, a people of heroic endurance, deserve a little seasonal mercy. The aircraft is an Airbus A321 with 184 seats, including 16 lie-flat business-class spots for people who believe international travel should resemble a well-funded nap. Tickets are already available at discounted fares, which means this is no longer a hypothetical pub conversation but an actual plan involving calendars and credit cards.
For Beaver County, this is not merely a flight. It’s a statement. We are now, functionally speaking, closer to Dublin than we used to be to downtown Pittsburgh during road construction season. This didn’t happen by accident. Dublin has been on Pittsburgh International Airport CEO Christina Cassotis’ radar for more than a decade, dating back to her very first international airline pitch in 2015. Aer Lingus, meanwhile, had Pittsburgh on its own radar for several years, waiting for the right aircraft and the right alignment of demand.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania nudged fate along with $5.25 million over two years—less, notably, than what some other cities have paid to get similar service off the ground. The expected payoff is about $23 million a year in regional economic impact.
The announcement came at the new landside terminal at PIT and marked the first new international route since the terminal opened. It is also the first time there has ever been a nonstop flight between Pittsburgh and Ireland.
The Pittsburgh Steelers, improbably but undeniably, played a role. When the team traveled to Dublin last fall, it brought visibility, credibility, and roughly 100,000 people wearing the same jersey.
Western Pennsylvania’s Irish ties, however, are not just cultural. They are deeply commercial. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, approximately 382 Irish companies—originating from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland—currently operate in Pennsylvania, employing more than 16,000 people across sectors such as life sciences, manufacturing, engineering, and technology. Ireland now ranks as Pennsylvania’s sixth-largest source of foreign direct investment.
And if that sounds abstract, consider Eaton.
Eaton Corporation plc is legally incorporated and headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, following its 2012 acquisition of Cooper Industries. Operationally, Eaton remains very much American, with its executive offices in Ohio and the majority of its revenue generated in the United States. But in the world of global business—and in tallies of Irish foreign direct investment—Eaton counts as Irish.
Which means that one of Beaver County’s own industrial anchors, Eaton’s High Power Lab in Beaver, is already part of that Ireland–Pennsylvania commercial bridge. Long before the Aer Lingus announcement, Ireland was quietly present on One Tuscarawas Road, embedded not in folklore but in transformers, power systems, and advanced engineering work.
In that sense, the new Dublin flight is less a beginning than a tightening of the loop.
For business travelers, the benefits are obvious. For leisure travelers, ancestral villages, castle ruins, and pubs serving food that looks deceptively simple but tastes like comfort itself are suddenly within reach.
And Guinness—real Guinness, poured correctly, consumed in a place where no one argues about it—will no longer require a passport-stamping marathon to obtain. You’ll just hop on Flight 80, settle in, and let history, commerce, and a bit of Irish magic do the rest.
Beaver County has always been good at building bridges—literal ones, economic ones, and occasionally emotional ones over a pint. Now we’ve added an aerial version. Ireland, it turns out, was never that far away. We just needed the right plane, the right partners, and the patience to wait for the tap to finally open.
