The Irish have always been notable travellers. A continental scholar, Walafrid Strabo, who lived over a thousand years ago, remarked that the Irish of his time were so given to wandering abroad that it was second nature to them. He had seen them coming by the shipload, monks and craftsmen […]

Eugene Daly looks at the factors that instigated the diminishment of our native tongue in Ireland. The mortal wounds of Gaelic Ireland were inflicted at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, but the death agony was prolonged for all of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth and nineteenth in […]

The hallowed period of Christmas was celebrated by the ancient Irish with great pomp and festivity. Fleming’s ‘History of Ancient Irish Customs’, gives an elaborate account of the festivity and amusement at this season of gaiety and mirth. He writes: “On Christmas Eve the village maidens went to the woods […]

Séan Ó Súilleabhain, in his book ‘Caitheam Aimsire ar Thóraimh’ (translated as ‘Irish Wake Amusements’) describes the customs attached to waking the dead in Ireland. The title is startling in that we don’t associate a wake with pastimes or call it merry. Ó Súilleabhain noted that wakes were “far merrier […]

The traditional time for marrying in rural Ireland used to be Shrovetide, that is the period between the Epiphany (January 6) and Shrove Tuesday. In the 19th, and well into the 20th century, it was taken for granted that those who wished to marry did so at that time. When […]