In the current COVID-19 pandemic, where the emphasis for many sectors is on recovery, the explicit subtitle of the meeting focused on how the Irish tourism sector aims to “survive to thrive” over the short term. While keeping the sector alive is an obvious objective, COVID-19 has provided the sector as a whole with the opportunity to invest in the growth of sustainable tourism from 2022 onwards. In the long term, Ireland’s emerging tourism strategy for a post-COVID landscape recognises the sector’s role as custodian of the environment, as part of this more specifically to explore options offered by different forms of tourism (i.e. slow tourism, ecotourism) and to evaluate the potential of natural areas and the role of the public realm in broadening the leisure and recreation offering. While not a new concept to Irish tourism, growing sustainable tourism is a renewed ambition for the sector, with an emphasis being placed on growth/value over volume, engaging the community, and lengthening seasonality. Thus, the general goal of the event was to generate a debate among policy-makers and practitioners in the sector on building a new sustainable tourism strategy for the whole country and for specific territories, and to consider the enabling role of spatial planning. The workshop’s objective is to show and discuss how ESPON knowledge can both inform and inspire the development of national policy instruments and to consider how national and regional stakeholders can make (better) use of trans-European knowledge and case studies from other countries.