Crossing the Border Between Ireland and Northern Ireland: Currency, Driving and What Actually Changes

The first time people cross from Donegal into Derry, or from Derry out to Inishowen, they usually ask the same thing: where is the border? There is no checkpoint, no barrier and no passport control. On most roads there is nothing at all. The only reliable clue is that the speed limit signs change from kilometres to miles, and the road numbers change from N and R to A and B.

That does not mean nothing changes. The money changes. Your phone changes network. The speed limits change units. Your hire car insurance may quietly stop working. I live beside this border and cross it most weeks, so here is everything that actually matters, in the order you will meet it.

Some links in this guide are affiliate links. If you book through one I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I only link to things I would use myself.

Planning the drive? Every stop on the Causeway Coastal Route, on one map, with what each one charges and how long to give it.

If you are crossing as part of a bigger trip, the border comes on day three of my five day Northern Ireland road trip.

How you will know you have crossed

There has been no physical infrastructure on the Ireland to Northern Ireland land border since 2005, and around 300 roads cross it. Some of them cross it more than once. You will not be stopped and you will not be asked for anything. These are the signs that you have gone from one jurisdiction to the other:

• Speed limit signs. The Republic uses kilometres per hour and writes km/h on the sign. Northern Ireland uses miles per hour and writes nothing. A plain white circle with 60 in it means 60mph in Northern Ireland and does not exist in the Republic.
• Road numbers. N and R roads in the Republic. A and B roads in Northern Ireland.
• Postboxes. Green in the Republic, red in Northern Ireland. Some of the green ones are old British boxes that were simply painted over, and you can still see the royal cipher under the paint.
• Number plates. Republic plates carry the county name in Irish and the year. Northern Ireland plates do not.
• Your phone. Often the loudest clue. More on that below.

Why there is a border at all

People ask this, and the honest answer is that the border is about a hundred years old, while the reason it is invisible is much more recent than that.

Ireland was partitioned in 1921. Six of the nine counties of Ulster stayed in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, the other twenty-six became what is now the Republic. The line was drawn along existing county boundaries, which is why it wanders the way it does, cutting through farms and, in a few places, through houses.

For most of the century that followed there was something physical to stop at. Customs posts from the 1920s. Then, through the Troubles, army checkpoints, watchtowers on the hills of south Armagh, and cross-border roads deliberately cratered or blocked to push traffic through a handful of approved crossings.

What changed

The Good Friday Agreement, also called the Belfast Agreement, was signed on 10 April 1998 and approved by referendums on both sides of the border that May. Which of the two names a person uses often says something about where they are from, so you will hear both.

It did several things at once. It set up a power-sharing assembly at Stormont, along with north-south and east-west institutions. It committed the parties to peaceful and democratic means. And it established the principle of consent: that Northern Ireland’s constitutional position is for the people of Northern Ireland to decide, and that if a majority there and in the Republic ever voted for a united Ireland, both governments would be obliged to give effect to it.

Alongside that came security normalisation. Bases and surveillance sites were dismantled through the late 1990s and 2000s, the south Armagh watchtowers came down, and Operation Banner, the British Army deployment that had run for more than thirty-seven years, formally ended at midnight on 31 July 2007.

The border you drive across today, with nothing on it, is the result of all that, plus both countries being in the EU single market and customs union, which removed the reason for customs checks.

And then Brexit

Brexit put the question back on the table, because the UK leaving the EU turned this line into an external frontier of the EU. Nobody wanted a hard border back. The answer, after a great deal of argument, is the Windsor Framework, under which Northern Ireland keeps following EU rules on goods so that checks do not have to happen on the land border.

Whatever you make of any of that, the practical upshot for a visitor is what it was before. You drive across and nothing happens.

Do you need a passport?

There are no immigration controls on the land border and nobody will check your documents as you cross it. But the legal position depends on your nationality, and it changed recently.

British and Irish citizens move freely under the Common Travel Area, which predates the EU and survived Brexit. You need nothing. Airlines and ferry companies will still want photo ID, so carry a passport or driving licence if you are flying or sailing.

Everyone else now needs a UK Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) to enter the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland is the United Kingdom. It costs £20, covers multiple trips over two years or until your passport expires, and is applied for online. Nobody will ask to see it at the border, but the requirement is real and it is enforced if you are later checked.

There is one important exemption. If you are legally resident in Ireland and hold a visa-exempt nationality, you do not need an ETA to travel within the Common Travel Area, provided you can show proof of your residence. So an American living in Dublin does not need one. An American on holiday in Dublin does.

Going the other way, into the Republic, there is no equivalent. Ireland is not in the Schengen Area, so the EU’s forthcoming ETIAS scheme does not apply to Ireland at all. If you have a passport that lets you into Ireland, you simply drive south.

Money: two currencies, twenty minutes apart

The Republic of Ireland uses the euro. Northern Ireland uses pounds sterling. Derry and Buncrana are half an hour apart and use different money. This catches out more visitors than anything else on this list.

What to actually do

• Use a card for almost everything. Contactless is universal on both sides, in cafés, car parks, small shops and rural pubs. A card that does not charge foreign transaction fees will save you more than any exchange bureau.
• Carry a small amount of both. Twenty euro and twenty pounds covers honesty boxes, car park machines that predate contactless, church candles and the odd van selling chips at a beach.
• Take cash out of an ATM on the side you are on. Machines on both sides dispense their local currency at the interbank rate. Airport exchange desks do not.
• Say no to dynamic currency conversion. If a card machine offers to charge you in your home currency instead of euro or sterling, decline. The rate is always worse.

Two things people get wrong

Northern Irish banknotes are still sterling. Banks in Northern Ireland issue their own notes. They look nothing like Bank of England notes and they are worth exactly the same. Anywhere on the island of Ireland, nobody blinks at them.

Where it catches people out is flying on to Britain with cash in your pocket. Shops in England can question Northern Irish notes, and some will refuse them outright. It is not that they are worth less, it is that the person behind the till has never seen one. So if you are heading over and you are carrying cash, change it before you go. Most banks will swap it for Bank of England notes, plenty of shops here will do it if you ask, and the currency exchange desks will too. Two minutes now saves you an argument at a till in Manchester.

Some Northern Ireland border towns take euro, but badly. Shops in Derry, Strabane and Newry will sometimes accept euro cash. The rate they give you will be poor and your change will be in sterling. Treat it as a courtesy, not a plan.

Sunday opening catches people out

In Northern Ireland, big shops can only open for five hours on a Sunday, between 1pm and 6pm. That is the law rather than the shop being awkward. It applies to anything over 280 square metres, so supermarkets, shopping centres and the big retail parks. Small shops, off licences, petrol stations and pharmacies are exempt and keep normal hours.

In the Republic there is no equivalent rule, so shops there open more or less as usual on a Sunday.

The practical version: do not drive to a retail park in Derry at eleven on a Sunday morning. Go for lunch first, then go shopping after one.

Your phone will cross before you do

Mobile signal does not respect the border. Along the Foyle, and all the way up the Inishowen coast, your phone will hop between Irish and UK networks on its own. You can be standing at Grianán of Aileach in County Donegal and get a text welcoming you to the UK.

This matters because of roaming charges. Since Brexit, several UK networks have reintroduced daily fees for using your allowance in the EU, Ireland included. As of 2026, EE and Vodafone charge roughly £2.72 to £2.75 a day, Three charges most customers £2.75 a day, and Sky charges £2. O2, Tesco Mobile, iD Mobile, Smarty and giffgaff still include EU roaming at no extra cost. Irish networks generally include UK roaming, but check yours.

If your network charges and you are here for more than a day or two, an eSIM usually works out cheaper than the daily fee. You download it before you travel, it sits alongside your normal SIM, and you keep your own number for calls and texts. One thing to watch: buy a plan that covers both the UK and Ireland. A lot of them cover one or the other, and on this border you want both. A Europe plan covers the pair of them, which saves you working it out at the airport.

The practical advice:

• Check your own network’s policy before you travel. The differences are large and they change.
• If you are on a network that charges daily, expect to be charged on days you never intended to leave the country, because the signal hopped.
• Turn off data roaming and rely on wifi if you are only crossing for an afternoon.
• Download your maps offline. The Inishowen map has every stop on the peninsula in one place if you are heading that way. Signal is genuinely poor in parts of Inishowen and the Sperrins regardless of which network you are on.

Driving across: the bit that actually costs money

Speed limits

Northern Ireland works in miles per hour. The Republic works in kilometres per hour. The defaults:

• Northern Ireland: 30mph in built-up areas, 60mph on single carriageways, 70mph on dual carriageways and motorways.
• Republic of Ireland: 50km/h in built-up areas, 60km/h on rural local roads, 80km/h on regional roads, 100km/h on national roads, 120km/h on motorways.

Note the rural local roads figure. It dropped from 80km/h to 60km/h in February 2025, and a lot of online guidance has not caught up. These are the narrow boreens with grass down the middle, and 60km/h is still faster than most of them deserve. The climb over Mamore Gap is one of them.

The conversion worth memorising: 100km/h is about 62mph, and 50km/h is about 31mph. So a Northern Irish 30mph zone and an Irish 50km/h zone are effectively the same thing.

Insurance and licences

If you are driving your own car, you are covered. Green cards have not been needed between Ireland and the UK since August 2021, and a valid Irish insurance disc is accepted as proof of cover in Northern Ireland. Your licence is valid on both sides.

If you are driving a hire car, this is the single most expensive mistake available to you. Most rental companies require written permission to take the car across the border, and most charge a cross-border fee, typically somewhere between about £25 and £65 depending on the company. Without that permission, your collision damage waiver and your insurance can be void from the moment you cross.

Do three things. Declare cross-border travel when you book, not at the desk. Get the authorisation written on the rental agreement or issued as a separate letter. Keep it in the car. Verbal agreement at the counter is worth nothing if something happens.

If you are still choosing a car, it is worth comparing hire prices across suppliers before you book, because the cross-border policy varies as much as the daily rate does.

Tolls and fuel

Northern Ireland has no toll roads at all. The Republic has several, mostly on the motorway network around Dublin and the south. The one to watch is the M50 around Dublin, which has no barriers: cameras read your plate and you must pay online by 8pm the following day or the fine escalates. If you are flying into Dublin and driving north, this will apply to you. Hire companies usually handle it, for a fee, but confirm that they do.

Fuel is priced per litre on both sides, in euro in the Republic and sterling in Northern Ireland. The price difference moves around with exchange rates and duty. Locals fill up on whichever side is cheaper that month, which is exactly as sensible as it sounds.

Healthcare, emergencies and insurance

Dial 999 or 112 on either side of the border. Both numbers work in both jurisdictions.

Under the Common Travel Area, Irish residents and UK residents can access publicly funded healthcare in the other country on the same basis as local residents. That covers emergency and necessary care. Carry your EHIC (from Ireland) or GHIC (from the UK) anyway, because it makes the paperwork faster, and take travel insurance regardless if you are coming from anywhere else.

One small mercy: plug sockets are identical. Both jurisdictions use the same three-pin type G socket at 230V. You do not need an adapter to cross the border, whatever a packing list tells you.

Customs and shopping

Since Brexit, this is technically a customs frontier between the EU and the UK. In practice there are no customs posts on the land border and no routine checks, and the Windsor Framework keeps Northern Ireland aligned with EU rules on goods. For anyone on a normal holiday, buying a jumper in Derry and driving it to Donegal, nothing happens and nothing is expected of you.

Where it does become real is if you fly onward. Standard duty free allowances apply when you leave the island, and they differ depending on where you are going. If you are buying serious quantities of alcohol or tobacco, check the allowance for your destination rather than assuming.

The crossings you will actually use

You do not need to plan a border crossing, but it helps to know where the main ones are.

• Bridgend (A2 / N13). The main Derry to Inishowen and Derry to Letterkenny road. This is the one most visitors use, and the drive from the Guildhall in Derry to Grianán of Aileach takes about twenty minutes.
• Muff (A2). The quieter coastal route up the Inishowen side of Lough Foyle, and the way you would go for Kinnagoe Bay.
• Strabane to Lifford. A bridge, and a town on each end of it.
• Newry to Dundalk (A1 / M1). The Belfast to Dublin corridor. Busy, fast, and the crossing itself is unmarked.
• Belleek and Aughnacloy. Rural crossings in Fermanagh and Tyrone that you will meet if you are doing the lakes or the Sperrins.

What to do on each side

The reason this matters is that the best trips on this island ignore the border completely. Derry is a Northern Irish city with a Donegal peninsula on its doorstep, and treating them as separate destinations is how people end up seeing half of what is there.

The Donegal side

Start with the full guide to things to do in Donegal, or narrow it down to Inishowen, the peninsula immediately across the border from Derry. The Inishowen map shows every stop on the Inishowen 100 in one place.

Individually: Malin Head is mainland Ireland’s most northerly point. Mamore Gap is the steep pass over the Urris Hills. Five Finger Strand has some of the highest dunes in Europe. Kinnagoe Bay is where a ship of the Spanish Armada came ashore in 1588. Carrickabraghy Castle sits on a rock the Atlantic is still working on. Fort Dunree guards Lough Swilly from a clifftop. Glenevin Waterfall is the easiest good walk in the peninsula. And the Doagh Famine Village is the strangest and most affecting thing on this list.

The Northern Ireland side

The things to do in Northern Ireland guide is the overview. If you are coming at a particular time of year, there are month guides for October, November and December.

For events, Derry Halloween is the biggest Halloween festival in Europe and takes over the whole walled city, with more across the region in the Northern Ireland Halloween guide. In November, the Armagh Georgian Festival turns the city back three hundred years for a weekend.

If you want to base yourself in Derry and work outwards in both directions, which is what I would do, there is a good spread of places to stay inside the walls.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a passport check at the Irish border?

No. There are no immigration controls on the land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and there is no physical infrastructure to stop at. Non-British and non-Irish travellers still legally require a UK ETA to be in Northern Ireland, even though nobody checks it at the crossing.

Can I use euro in Northern Ireland?

Sometimes, in border towns, at a poor rate and with sterling change. Northern Ireland’s currency is the pound sterling. Use a card, or take sterling out of a local ATM.

Will my phone charge me roaming fees near the border?

It can, because the signal crosses before you do. Several UK networks charge a daily fee for EU roaming, so your phone can trigger a charge while you are still physically in the north of Ireland or the south of Northern Ireland. Turn off data roaming if you are not crossing deliberately.

Can I take a hire car from the Republic into Northern Ireland?

Usually yes, but only with written permission from the rental company, and usually for a cross-border fee. Arrange it when you book. Without it your insurance may not cover you north of the border. It is the single most common thing that goes wrong on a day trip from Dublin, so sort it before you drive.

How far is Derry from Donegal?

Twenty minutes. The border at Bridgend is about six miles from Derry city centre, and Inishowen begins immediately on the other side.

Are the speed limits different?

Yes. Northern Ireland is in miles per hour, the Republic is in kilometres per hour. A sign showing 60 means 60mph in Northern Ireland and 60km/h, which is 37mph, in the Republic. Read the units.

Pin this for later

Planning a trip? Save this to Pinterest so you can find it again.