Ireland and the Irish

April 3, 2010 to April 5, 2010.
This is a double event, with arts in its various guises for the adults while the kids enjoy their own special Bumble Bee Festival.

Its very much an activity based event, with lots of opportunity to dress up and join in, and is strongly community based, so visitors who attend will have ample chances to meet and socialise with local people.

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Every county in Ireland has its own colours, proudly waved and worn by team supporters during the annual GAA All Ireland Championships.

They have nicknames and county songs too – and all of them are listed here.

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March 17, 2010;
The annual national day is celebrated in cities and town across Ireland with parades and festivals of various types taking place almost everywhere.

While the biggest event is the St Patrick’s Festival in Dublin, those who can’t make it to the capital will have plenty to entertain them, and there are even some less frenetic events for those who prefer a quieter pace.

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March 12, 2010 to March 17, 2010.
Dublin holds Ireland’s biggest St Patrick’s day festival, a six day non-stop series of events, day and night, with something for all ages.

The big event is the annual parade through Dublin’s streets, with participants traveling from all over the world to take part in what is an increasingly colourful spectacle.

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The first Irish people, who probably arrived from Scotland about 9000 years ago, were hunter gatherers, constantly on the move in search of food.

The legacy of extraordinary buildings and artefacts that they left us are evidence that by 3000BC people lived in complex societies with considerable knowledge and skills.

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The food people ate in the past in Ireland has always been closely interwoven with other aspects of our history, particularly so because for a signigicant chunk of our history we were under foreign power.

The effects of this could be benign – the introduction of new foods for example – but also disastrous, as was the case when famine struck in the mid 1800’s.

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In early Ireland everyone ate more or less the same food, initially whatever they could hunt or forage, later grains and other farmed crops.

As the centuries passed an increasing divide appeared between the diets of the rich and poor, especially when the Norman and English occupiers began exporting foods on which the poorer Irish had depended. Survival became a real struggle for those at the bottom of the pile.

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An introduction to the origin and meaning of baby names or Christian names in Ireland.

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The Celts were artists and craftsmen and had a complex and well ordered social structure, and have left us a legacy of language and culture that has persisted for centuries.

The Celtic system of Brehon Law was an incredibly detailed code for social interaction, based on fairness and equality, and one which many would see as superior to anything we have today!

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The origin and meaning of place names in Ireland can be tricky to decipher, but they are a vivid reminder of our varied past, with names of Gaelic, Anglo-Norman, English, Scottish and even Viking origin.

Because many were translated phonetically into English, it can take a little detective work to get to their meaning, but doing so can reveal a lot about the place that bears the name.

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