The old Irish Halloween games, from snap apple and apple ducking to burning two named nuts on the fire, the blindfold saucers of water, clay and a ring, egg whites…

A proper Irish colcannon recipe, with metric and US measures: floury potatoes, kale or cabbage, scallions, hot milk and plenty of butter. Then how to hide a Halloween charm safely,…

Bram Stoker couldn’t stand until he was about seven, became athletics champion of Dublin University, spent over a decade in the civil service at Dublin Castle and reviewed plays unpaid…

Stingy Jack outwitted the Devil and ended up shut out of Heaven and Hell, wandering with a light. Here is the 1836 Dublin Penny Journal tale, an 1851 poem that…

Samhain (SOW-in) is the old Irish festival that began winter on 1 November, and still the Irish word for November. Here’s how to say it, what the medieval tales say…

The Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, is the great epic of Ireland’s Ulster Cycle. Here it is retold from the early translations: Medb and Ailill’s pillow talk…

Hy-Brasil, Í Bhreasail in Irish, is the phantom island said to rise off Ireland’s west coast once every seven years. Here’s the real story: the round island on sea charts…

Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin held prisoners from 1796 to 1924: debtors, Famine-era thieves, children, convicts bound for Australia, and rebels from Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell to the 1916…

On Easter Monday 1916, rebels seized the GPO in Dublin and Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Here is the story of the Easter Rising: Home Rule,…

The Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle, Co. Cork, is said to give anyone who kisses it the gift of the gab. Here’s how the kiss works, why early writers disagreed…

The Giant’s Causeway in Co. Antrim is about 40,000 basalt columns left by a lava lake that cooled around 60 million years ago. Here’s why most columns are six-sided, the…

Ireland never had snakes for St Patrick to banish. Here’s why the island is snake-free, which ancient writers noticed it first, how a 12th-century monk gave Patrick the credit on…

Croagh Patrick, the Reek, is Ireland’s holy mountain. Here’s St Patrick’s 40-day fast as Tírechán and the Tripartite Life tell it, where the snake legend really comes from, Reek Sunday…

Clonmacnoise, Cluain Mhic Nóis in Irish, is St Ciarán’s monastic city on the River Shannon in Co. Offaly. Here’s its story, from the founding legend and the Book of the…

Glendalough, the glen of two lakes in Co. Wicklow, is where St Kevin lived as a hermit and founded one of Ireland’s great monasteries. Here are his legends (the blackbird,…

Ireland’s round towers have been called fire temples, phallic symbols and Viking hideouts. Here’s what they really were: cloigtheach, the bell house, with how to say it, when and how…

The Molly Maguires were Irish immigrant miners in Pennsylvania’s coalfields, blamed for 16 killings and hanged after trials run largely by company lawyers. Here’s the full story: the Irish origins…

The Hill of Tara in Co. Meath is remembered as the seat of Ireland’s high kings. Here’s what’s really on the hill, from the 5,000-year-old Mound of the Hostages to…

Newgrange was built around 3200 BC, centuries before the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge’s stone circle. Here’s the passage tomb inside and out: the triple spiral, the solstice roof-box and its…

Grosse Île, a small island in the St Lawrence downriver from Quebec City, was the quarantine station for the port of Quebec from 1832 to 1937. In Black ’47, as…