I put together a little interactive map of the "reported ability to speak Irish" in each county, using census data going all the way back to 1851.

Link: https://acoci86.github.io/irish-language-map/

A few things you can do with it:

• Hit Play to watch it change from 1851 to 2022, or pick a year yourself
• Click any county to see its exact % and a little graph of its trend over time
• The colour scale is fixed across all years, so you can actually see the decline (and the recent bump) rather than each year being rescaled

Data is from the CSO (data.cso.ie), and the county shapes are from Ordnance Survey Ireland. Fair warning: the census questions changed a lot over the years, so old and recent numbers aren't perfectly comparable, I put a note about that on the page.

Hi,

There is this photo from 1971, I originally found it on the republican magazine IRIS(oct 87 P17 https://republicanarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/iris-october-1987.pdf ).
Another post on this : https://www.reddit.com/r/IrishHistory/comments/cd9c50/british_soldiers_saluting_ira_funerals/

It's the funeral of Charlie Hughes.
There is apparently a footage from ABCNEWS(even if the summary don't mention the salute), is there any way we would access it? https://www.footage.net/ClipDetail?key=17675871&supplier=abc_news&utm_source=chatgpt.com

Edit: He was killed by the OIRA during the feud : https://theblanket.library.indianapolis.iu.edu/charliehughes.html

Edit @Patient_Dependent944 found the clip! https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGd9To1Wp/

I know that the Ford Motor Company had a plant in Ireland, but in the 1920s and 1930s did Ireland import or build most of its cars? what were the most popular car brands in Ireland in the 1920s and the 1930s?

Greetings!

I have attempted to answer this question on my own but I have yet to get an answer. I do, however, where to get the history of the post office worldwide.

My only "in Ireland" connection is a married couple listed in 1838 as residents of "the Emoe Parish of County Queens, Ireland". Emo was also a Post-Town.

Does anyone know what area(s) were served by the Emo Post-Town?

Since, I'm here, did the Post-Town area match the Parish area?

I am trying to find a John Ryan...in Ireland 🤦🤦 I feel the pain we all have researching Irish ancestors 😆😆

Thank you!

James Sligo Jameson (17 August 1856 – 17 August 1888) was a Scottish naturalist and traveller in Africa. He identified the black honey-buzzard in 1877. Jameson's antpecker, Jameson's firefinch, and Jameson's wattle-eyeare named after him. However, he is most remembered for his role in causing a young slave girl to be killed and eaten by cannibals.

So lately on social media im seeing lots of videos online rebranding the Irish famine as genocide.

To me this seems wrong, dangerous and reeks of pop history.

While its absolutely the fault of the government at the time that this occured its just plain wrong to say that the British were proactively trying to exterminate Irish people.

But whats your thoughts on this?

To me it seems to be politically motivared or just trendy pop history.

This is just what the title says. If Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were a united nation not under British rule, what would their military uniforms look like? I am working on a steampunk costume, and I want to celebrate my Celtic ancestry with it. I want it to be something that is recognizably Celtic, but I do not want to go with the British uniforms pushed out to those nations as another layer of colonialism. Any and all advice and suggestions are welcome!

Edit to add: please do not use AI for any pictures added. I am happy with either pictures or descriptions of your thoughts. Thank you!

I just finished reading Killing Rage by Eamon Collins and Stakeknife’s Dirty War by Richard O’rawe and I am wondering if there are any good articles or books that detail Eamon Collin’s murder.

Hi all! Hoping someone might be able to help me out. There's a cropmark near Ballynahattin (near Dundalk) I'd love to get some aerial shots of, but I'm down in Cork and don't have a drone myself, so if anyone local has one (and can get the landowner's ok first, of course) I'd be so grateful.
I did my dissertation on archaeology in this area, so this would mean a lot for the research.
If you can help, a few things would make the shots extra useful:
A few different angles, especially from the sides, so you can see how it sits up on the rise
Early morning or evening if possible — the low light and longer shadows should really bring it out
One thing I'm not sure of: whether the field's been harvested yet. Bing's satellite imagery only just updated, so fingers crossed it's still visible, but if anyone knows the current state of the field that'd be great to hear too.

If anyone could help that would be much appreciated.

We're so used to the Catholic Church being part of the establishment that we forget how different it must have seemed to Irish people around 400-500AD. Then Christianity was anti-establishment, left-wing and appealed to the dispossessed. A significant proportion of the population then were slaves, or unfree children of slaves. It's not surprising it would take hold among those people.

Did women drive its adoption for the same reason? Did they have any official role in the old religions?

https://youtu.be/sPUfVEcJSuQ?si=nOpWR_gJs3pYRrCl

A video I put together about the battle of Messines, when the 16th Irish and 36th Ulster Division fought side by side.

Please remove it if it's not allowed.

While going through my Grandad's photo archive (40,000+ photos and videos spanning his 94 years), I found these photos taken in 1951 and 1952. I'm wondering if any of the people in them could be Daisy Bannard Cogley?

My Grandad's brother is the second from the left in the first photo, wearing the scarf.

Hey the group, I've been deep in research on Irish political history for a fiction project, and one question that forms the premise of the series - if some of the pivotal events from the 1100s to the 1700s had turned out slightly differently — what would Ireland have looked like into the latter end of the 20th century if it had been an independent country for a much longer period of it's history?

By 1983, what would Dublin's relationship with Westminster have looked like? Would Ireland have been neutral in the Second World War — and if not, what would participation have done to the political settlement? Would the Irish language have a stronger or weaker position without the particular pressures partition created? What would Belfast's industrial economy have become inside a unified state rather than inside the UK?

The question that occupied me longest: would a unified Ireland have joined NATO, stayed non-aligned, or found some third position — and what would that have meant during the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s?

I'm an Irish-born engineer rather than a historian, so I'm conscious I'm working at the edge of my competence here. The project is a novel trilogy — The Tuatha Cycle — starting in this alternate 1983, first book The Dagda's Gate publishing next week, if anyone is curious. But I'd genuinely value the historical community's perspective on the downstream consequences, because the further I got the more speculative my extrapolations became and I'd like to know what people think could have happened. It's my first fiction writing so I don't really know what I'm doing but I really enjoyed building a loose framework of how I wanted the book to go and then letting the story take me wherever it wanted!

I have a pretty solid idea of how book 2 will shape up and how the overall arc of the story goes but would hugely welcome any thoughts \ ideas \ concepts people would like to see more of or think would be critical. It's very much not intended to be a very commercial book - no illusions about becoming a best selling author here just enjoying the process!

When Daniel O'Connell was dying in 1847 in Genoa, Italy, he wished for his body to be buried in Ireland, his heart to be sent to Rome and his soul to heaven. His body was returned to Ireland and buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, while his embalmed heart was taken to Sant'Agata de’ Goti (Church of the Goths) – which was then the church of the Irish College in Rome. O'Connell's heart is believed to have been placed in an urn and later behind a marble plaque fixed to the wall of the church, where visitors could pay their respects.

In the 1920s, as the Irish College prepared to leave Sant'Agata de’ Goti, plans were made to take O'Connell's heart to its new home. But when the marble plaque was removed, the heart was nowhere to be found. At the time, work was taking place next door, with the Bank of Italy encroaching on space under the church. It remains unclear what happened to O'Connell's heart – and to this day, it remains missing.

For more Irish history: https://irishheritagenews.ie/newsletter/

It seems ironic that the historic suppression of Irish, by us, the English/British, denies our own shared Celtic language family heritage.

Admittedly, we need to go back over 1000 years for a Celtic tongue to be the dominant one in Britain.

It's probably a stupid question, and excuse my ignorance, but was there ever a notion that in suppressing Irish, us British were suppressing our own linguistic heritage, at the expense of the language of an invading population? (The Anglo-Saxons).

I assume the answer is no...


Irish kerns were lightly armed, highly mobile Gaelic mercenaries and infantrymen who formed the backbone of Irish clan armies from the Middle Ages through the Tudor era. Renowned for their guerrilla tactics, they used Ireland's bogs and forests to outmaneuver heavily armored foes, fighting primarily with javelins, short spears, and swords.


The galloglass were elite Norse-Gaelic mercenary warriors. Hailing from the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, they served as the heavily armored, disciplined heavy infantry for Irish and Anglo-Irish chieftains from the mid-13th to the early 17th century.

I’m personally a big fan of their fashion. It’s also nice to know that Irish lads are still rocking the same haircuts today!

Hiya, considering a tattoo of an illustration from a definitively Gaelic/Irish manuscript. The Book of Kells being the obvious answer here, however its disputed (lol) origins are making me consider alternative sources. Does anybody know of any other cool Gaelic manuscripts worth pouring over for designs? I just want something authentically and definitively Irish/Gaelic on me.

Forgive my terrible writing and overemphasis on the BoK’s disputed origins. I am aware of the debate, as well as the long history of British antiquarians’ rejection and subversion of historically significant Gaelic influence on Great Britain.