How to Read The Irish News Without a Subscription

The Irish News is the largest-selling daily newspaper in Northern Ireland and the paper of record for nationalist Belfast, with the most thorough GAA coverage on the island. Its website has run a paywall for several years, and readers following Northern Irish politics or club football from Dublin, London or further afield soon hit it. This guide explains how the Irish News paywall works and how to read a full article without a subscription.

How the Irish News paywall works

The Irish News runs a metered paywall. Non-subscribers get a small number of free articles a month, tracked in a cookie, before the article body is replaced with a subscription prompt. The paper does not publish the allowance and has tightened it over time, so treat it as a few. Some breaking news is occasionally left outside the meter. A digital subscription removes the meter and includes the e-paper.

The paper's website serves the complete article in the HTML so that search engines can index it, and applies the paywall with a script that runs in the browser. A crawler-style reader that never runs the script retrieves the full text. This is the same arrangement that makes the Irish Times readable, and our guide to metered versus hard paywalls explains why it differs from sites that enforce the gate on the server.

In our test on 28 September 2026, an 897-word Irish News GAA match report loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 30 paragraphs.

Read an Irish News article in full

• Copy the article link. Irish News links look like irishnews.com/section/subsection/headline-slug-ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP/.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The article appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

News, politics, GAA and the paper's comment pages all load the same way. The e-paper is subscriber-only and is not available through any reader.

What about the other Northern Irish papers?

The Belfast Telegraph blocks automated requests, so the reader cannot fetch its articles. The News Letter, owned by the same group as The Scotsman, behaves the same way. In the Republic, Independent.ie also blocks the reader. That leaves the Irish News and the Irish Times as the two paid Irish dailies that load in full, alongside the Irish Examiner, which is largely free to read on its own site.

Other approaches

• Library access. Libraries NI offers free access to the Irish News through PressReader with a library card, and many libraries in the Republic carry it the same way.
• Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it. The allowance is small.
• The e-paper. The page-by-page digital edition is subscriber-only.

How it compares with the British papers

Readers in Northern Ireland tend to follow the London titles as well. The Times and The Independent both load in full through the reader, while The Telegraph does not. Our master list of every site you can read for free groups them by country.

Support the paper if you read it often

The Irish News is independently owned and has been in the same family for generations. Its subscriptions fund a newsroom that covers Northern Ireland in a depth nobody else attempts. Digital subscriptions start at a few pounds a month on introductory terms, and if the paper is part of your daily routine, that is the right way to keep it going.