Ireland Culture & Language

For a country of five million people, Ireland’s cultural output is difficult to account for by any normal measure.

Writing

Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney all won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Joyce, who did not, rewrote the novel — Ulysses takes place on a single Dublin day, 16 June 1904, which the city now celebrates annually as Bloomsday. Behind them sit Swift, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, Flann O’Brien, Edna O’Brien and a continuing run of contemporary novelists.

Music

Traditional music is transmitted by ear and played in sessions — informal gatherings in pubs where musicians play tunes for each other rather than for an audience. Fiddle, flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes, bodhrán and box; jigs, reels and slow airs. The uilleann pipes are UNESCO-listed. Alongside it, Ireland has produced a run of internationally successful popular musicians out of all proportion to its size.

Language and place

Irish survives as a community language in the Gaeltacht areas of Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, Cork and Waterford, and in the place names of everywhere else — almost every town name in Ireland is an anglicised Irish phrase describing the spot.

Sport

Gaelic football and hurling are organised by parish and county through the GAA, played by amateurs, and draw crowds of eighty thousand to Croke Park. Hurling is among the fastest field sports in the world and is essentially unplayed outside Ireland.

The pub

The pub is the social infrastructure rather than simply a place to drink — it holds the music, the conversation, the funeral gathering and the match. Rural pubs that double as a hardware shop or an undertaker still exist.

English is what everyone speaks, in a distinctive and regionally varied form — Hiberno-English carries Irish grammar underneath it, which is why people say they are after doing something rather than having done it.

Irish is the first official language of the state and is taught to every schoolchild, but it is the everyday community language only in the Gaeltacht areas along the western seaboard, where perhaps seventy thousand people use it daily. Road signs are bilingual nationwide, and in the Gaeltacht they are in Irish only — worth knowing when navigating, since An Daingean and Dingle are the same town.

A few words are in general English use here: slán for goodbye, sláinte for cheers, craic for fun or company, garda for a police officer, and Taoiseach for the prime minister, which is never translated.

Accents vary sharply over short distances; Cork, Kerry, Donegal and inner Dublin are all noticeably different, and visitors often need a day to tune in.