If you want to evoke the Irish countryside in an aroma, then the turf-scented candle is the only choice. For anyone of a certain age (ahem), the smell of turf fires as you travelled into the west of the country is as evocative …

When Greg and I were children, we and our families would meet up in his Dad’s office on O’Connell Street to watch the St Patrick’s Day parade. Memory is notoriously unreliable, but what I associate with those parades is an endless …

From 2023 on, the first Monday in February is a public holiday in Ireland in honour of St Brigid. The establishment of this ‘bank holiday’, as they are known here, was partly because Ireland has one of the lowest number of public …

This phrase, which translates as ‘Women’s Christmas’ refers to the Irish tradition where on 6 January women, having worked hard over the Christmas period, ‘got a day off’ and men took over the domestic tasks. Times have changed, but in recent years …

This Irish proverb translates as ‘better health than wealth’ – no doubt a view readers of this blog will go along with! But it also reminds me of a comment made years ago by a visitor about the Irish attitude to money. Not only had she noticed people …

This itemization is just one of several hundred “triads” found in a number of Irish manuscripts dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Triads (and some heptads) were used to recall information to be passed on from generation to …

Welcome to the IFMSS 2024 blog. I, the writer, am Mary Nolan, one of the organizers of the IFMSS 2024 Meeting to be held in Castlemartyr Resort, Co Cork, Ireland. I’m the person ‘on the ground’; I live in Dublin; am an artist, a writer, an occasional lecturer in linguistics …