The state of tantra in Ireland, 2026
There are at least nineteen named tantra practitioners working publicly in Ireland today. The first residential practitioner training on the island launched in 2023. The Dublin community Meetup has over 1,100 members. Despite all this, no Irish publication has done a serious state-of-the-scene piece in over a decade. This is one.
The numbers
tantra.ie has indexed 19 publicly identifiable tantra practitioners and schools working in Ireland as of 2026-05-26. Distribution by county:
- Dublin: 8 named practitioners
- Cork: 2
- West Cork: 1 (anchored on An Sanctoir community centre)
- Wicklow: 3
- Galway: 1
- Belfast / Northern Ireland: 3 (including the only residential practitioner training on the island)
- Visiting schools and training providers: 1
That count excludes (a) anonymous massage operations using "tantra" as a euphemism for commercial sex, which we don't list, and (b) registered yoga teachers who occasionally incorporate tantric philosophy into class but don't market themselves as tantra teachers. Both groups exist in Ireland and both are larger than the 19 above, but neither is what this piece is about.
The actual scene of named, public-facing tantra practitioners is small enough to map. It is also large enough to support a public meetup with over a thousand members, a 6-week residential training, and several regional weekend retreats per year. That combination — small, named, networked — is the headline.
Dublin: the centre of gravity
Dublin holds the largest single concentration of tantra practice in Ireland and has done since the early 2010s. 8 of the 19 practitioners on our directory are based in or work primarily out of Dublin. May Gonzalez has been working here as a sacred-sexuality priestess and somatic sexologist since 2016. Pavla operates from a purpose-built handmade Norwegian cabin in North Dublin. Tantra TLC runs Dublin's only formally women-only tantric massage practice. Art of Transcendence Tantra serves Dublin clients from Wicklow.
The scene has also acquired a public-facing wellness wing. Jenny Keane — trauma-certified, somatic-experiencing-trained, profiled by RTE Lifestyle in 2023 as the "Orgasm Queen of Ireland" — has built an audience of thousands through her tantric yoga and sex-education programming. Her work sits at the mainstream edge of the scene: tantra yoga in the studio, sex education on stage, the bridge between practice and the general wellness public.
And the community infrastructure is real. The Dublin "Tantric Workshops and Classes" Meetup has over 1,100 members and has hosted ongoing public events for years. Conscious Body School runs an intermittent 3-day Egyptian Tantra workshop format in the city. One Heart Tantra operates session weeks in both Dublin and Enniskillen with a four-hands practitioner-training format. The Dublin scene is mature, networked, and at this point overdue for serious cultural press coverage.
Cork and West Cork: the immersion hub
Cork is the second hub by depth, with two distinct registers. The Tantra Cork team operates one of the longest-running collective practices on the island — eight named women practising independently under a shared brand and treatment standard: Raven, Jasmin, Anna Mari, Danu, Afrodite, Lucia, Maya, and Pavla. Danu also runs an independent practice as Tantra Garden.
West Cork is the residential-immersion hub. An Sanctoir, the 30-acre holistic community centre at Bawnaknockane near Ballydehob, hosts the recurring Tantra from the Heart 2-Day Immersion led by Leonie — a clinical psychologist with eight years of additional study in tantra, breathwork, yoga and Traditional Chinese Medicine. The centre is also running a 6-week "Embodiment, Touch & Conscious Relating in Somatic Consent" training in summer 2026, the deepest formal-training programme on the island outside Belfast.
Dzogchen Beara, the Tibetan Buddhist retreat centre on the West Cork coast, has been teaching contemplative tantric practice within the Vajrayana tradition since the 1980s. It does not market as "tantra" in the Western sense and is not part of the neo-tantra scene, but it is part of the longer tantric tradition on the island and worth knowing about for anyone serious about the contemplative side of the practice.
Northern Ireland: the training side
The biggest single structural shift in the Irish scene over the last three years happened in Belfast. In 2023, Rachael Nitya co-created the first residential Tantric Massage Practitioner Training (levels 1 and 2) on the island. Before that, every Irish practitioner who wanted formal certification had to travel — to the UK, to mainland Europe, or to one of the European schools like Connective Tantra. After 2023, Belfast became the answer.
Belfast also hosts Danielle Darcy's Holy Touch Temple — a decade-plus practice in somatic sexology and devotional bodywork blending classical and neo-tantra, temple arts, breathwork, music. And Meditate NI runs Kadampa Buddhist tantric meditation classes — non-sexual, contemplative, Vajrayana-tradition practice, the closest thing to formal tantric religious training the island offers.
The North-South geography of practice matters. The South-East has Wicklow (Soft Core, Fiona, Art of Transcendence). The South-West has West Cork. The North has Belfast for both bodywork and the meditation tradition. The middle — the Midlands, the West outside Galway, the entire North-West coast outside Derry — is essentially uncovered. If you live in Sligo or Donegal and want to do this work, you are travelling.
What has changed since the last time anyone wrote this piece
The scene has professionalised. In the mid-2010s, when her.ie ran "Conscious sexuality has arrived in Ireland", the scene was a handful of named practitioners and a lot of cultural newness. A decade on, several practitioners now have clinical-psychology, sexology, EFT, somatic-experiencing, or registered-bodywork credentials alongside their tantric training. The vocabulary has changed too — "sacred sexuality", "somatic sexology", "trauma-informed" are now standard language across the scene. This professionalisation is real and verifiable: look at any practitioner's current site and compare to the language a 2014 practitioner site used.
The training infrastructure exists now. The 2023 Belfast residential practitioner training and the 2026 West Cork 6-week somatic consent programme are both substantial — hundreds of contact hours, supervised practice, ethics training built in. A serious Irish student no longer has to choose between travelling abroad and an informal apprenticeship.
The mainstream wellness wing exists. Jenny Keane being interviewed by RTE Lifestyle in 2023 is a marker. So is her presence at WellFest. So is the broader Irish wellness press treating tantra as part of the conversation rather than as a punchline. The Catholic-conservative panic frame has, finally, lost its grip on the topic.
The community side is bigger than people realise. 1,100+ members in the Dublin Meetup, with active weekly events, is more people than turn up to most political-party youth wings. This is now a real subculture with its own infrastructure.
What is still broken
There is no licensing body. Anyone can call themselves a tantra practitioner in Ireland. There is no statutory regulator and no industry-recognised certification register. The named, public-facing practitioners we list mostly do hold credible training credentials and run ethical practices, but verifying this falls entirely on the client. We have published a vetting guide for this reason; it is no substitute for regulation.
The commercial-sex confusion is unresolved. Some massage operators use "tantra" as a euphemism for sexual services, which (a) confuses people genuinely looking for tantric bodywork, (b) drags the editorial reputation of the legitimate scene downward, and (c) creates safety risk for clients walking into the wrong type of premises. This is not a problem the legitimate scene caused, and it is not a problem the legitimate scene can solve alone.
Geographic gaps. The Midlands, the North-West, the rural West outside Galway — if you live there and want to work with a tantra practitioner, you travel. There is no working business model yet to put practitioners in those areas at the price point the local market would bear.
The Buddhist-tantric and neo-tantric worlds barely talk to each other. The Kadampa centre in Belfast and the Tibetan tradition at Dzogchen Beara teach Vajrayana — the formal, classical, religious tantra. The neo-tantra teachers in Dublin and Cork teach something rooted in but quite different from that tradition. Both are legitimate; both have something to learn from the other. The bridge between them is currently invisible, and we think it should be more visible. See our Buddhist tantra primer.
The press almost never covers this seriously. her.ie did it once, ten years ago. The Irish Examiner has touched it occasionally. Image, RTE Lifestyle and similar outlets have done one-off profile pieces. There has been no serious state-of-the-scene reporting in over a decade. That gap is part of why we built this site.
What happens next
The scene is at the size and stage where the next structural moves are visible. Three things would meaningfully shift it forward in 2026-27:
A serious press piece, in a serious outlet, naming names. Not a panic piece, not a stunt, not a lifestyle profile that treats one teacher as the whole scene. A genuine state-of-the-scene piece by a credible reporter who has done the legwork. We have pitched three Irish outlets on exactly this; one or more will take it.
A practitioner association or peer-review body. Not a statutory regulator — that's a government question, and tantra is far down the queue — but an industry-led peer body that publishes a code of conduct, accepts complaints, and gives the public a way to distinguish credentialled practitioners from anyone with a website. The Belfast training and the West Cork programme are now substantial enough that their graduates could form the nucleus of such a body.
Geographic expansion via travelling residentials. The Midlands and the West would be better served not by a permanent practitioner in every county, but by a few of the established teachers running residential weekend formats on rotation — Athlone in spring, Sligo in summer, Donegal in autumn. Dakini Dea already travels; the model is proven; it could spread.
Who we are, and how we did this
tantra.ie is published by Raven Design, an Irish independent editorial studio. The directory was built from named, public-facing sources: each practitioner's own website, their Meetup or Eventbrite presence, third-party listings on traditionalbodywork.com / BookRetreats / tantra.town, and Irish press coverage where it exists (RTE Lifestyle, Irish Examiner, her.ie, HerFamily, Positive Life). Our full sources are listed openly. Every practitioner is linked to their primary site so a reader can verify them independently.
Our editorial line is on /code-of-ethics/: named practitioners only, public business, traceable training, no escort listings, no paid placements. That line is the thing that makes this directory useful rather than noisy. If any of the practitioners we list would prefer not to be, a single email gets them delisted within 24 hours. None has, so far.
Press, academic researchers and listed practitioners: contact.
Published 2026-05-26. Cite as: "The state of tantra in Ireland, 2026", tantra.ie, 2026-05-26, https://tantra.ie/journal/state-of-the-scene-2026/.