Ireland

Samhain is a pagan religious festival originating from an ancient Celtic spiritual tradition. In modern times, Samhain (a Gaelic word pronounced “SAH-win”) is usually celebrated from October 31 to November 1 to welcome in the harvest and usher in “the dark half of the year.” ...read more

Imbolc is a pagan holiday celebrated from February 1 through sundown February 2. Based on a Celtic tradition, Imbolc was meant to mark the halfway point between winter solstice and the spring equinox in Neolithic Ireland and Scotland. The holiday is celebrated by Wiccans and ...read more

Huguenots were French Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who followed the teachings of theologian John Calvin. Persecuted by the French Catholic government during a violent period, Huguenots fled the country in the 17th century, creating Huguenot settlements all over ...read more

New York’s longest-serving police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, is an Irish-American. So is the department’s current commissioner, James O’Neill. Municipal police departments across the country celebrate the role of Irish-American cops with Emerald Societies—and there’s historic ...read more

The Celts were a collection of tribes with origins in central Europe that shared a similar language, religious beliefs, traditions and culture. It’s believed that the Celtic culture started to evolve as early as 1200 B.C. The Celts spread throughout western Europe—including ...read more

Every year, up to 50,000 people around the world are selected for the United States’ “diversity” visa lottery, out of around 14 million applicants. Yet despite its name, the lottery wasn’t originally intended to promote cultural and racial diversity in the U.S. Back when Congress ...read more

The Irish Potato Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, began in 1845 when a fungus-like organism called Phytophthora infestans (or P. infestans) spread rapidly throughout Ireland. The infestation ruined up to one-half of the potato crop that year, and about three-quarters of ...read more

Dr. James Barry was actually born Margaret Ann Bulky around 1789 in County Cork, Ireland, at a time when women were barred from most formal education, and were certainly not allowed to practice medicine. She was the second child of Jeremiah (a grocer) and Mary-Ann Bulky. While ...read more

The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of ...read more

The Irish have a special claim over St. Patrick’s Day, even though the holiday has come to be celebrated by people of all backgrounds and religions. But was the man of the hour, St. Patrick, even Irish? Long story short, no. Not much is known about the birthplace of St. ...read more

Not even St. Patrick himself could protect Ireland from the Vikings. When the Nordic raiders launched their first attack on Ireland in 795 A.D. by raiding an island monastery, Irish monks wielded prayers in self-defense. No heavenly intercession arrived, however, to save their ...read more

At four minutes past noon, on the front steps of the General Post Office, Patrick Pearse read the rebels’ Proclamation of the Irish Republic. It addressed both Irish men and women, declaring “religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens.” ...read more

In 1903, a team of archaeologists found thousands of bones in Alice and Gwendoline Cave in County Clare, on Ireland’s western coast. In their report of the excavation, the scientists noted that they had found seven cuts from a long blade on one of the bones: the patella, or knee ...read more

Earlier this year, a fierce storm ripped across northwest Ireland’s wild Atlantic coastline and tore a 215-year-old beech tree in the middle of a County Sligo field straight out of the ground. It wasn’t the massive tree’s crooked, spindly branches that drew wide-spread attention, ...read more

Beginning in the 1840s, Ireland’s rotting potato crops drove hundreds of thousands of its people to flee to the United States. The discrimination that Irish immigrants encountered in their new home was hardly subtle. Instead, it was as plain as the black-and-white print that ...read more

As the stalks of Ireland’s potato plants began to wilt in the autumn of 1845, so did her people. Already mired in extreme poverty under the thumb of the British, Ireland plunged into ruin during the Potato Famine. So desperate was the plight of the Irish that former slave ...read more

Kissing Ireland’s Blarney Stone, a tradition that’s been around for several centuries, is said to give a person the gift of eloquence and persuasiveness. The iconic stone is set in a wall of Blarney Castle, constructed in 1446 by Dermot McCarthy, king of Munster, on the site of a ...read more

Fifty years after the death of St. Patrick on March 17, 461 A.D., another Celtic saint continued the work of converting pagan Ireland to Christianity. Born near Tralee in County Kerry in 484 A.D., St. Brendan the Navigator traveled tirelessly to evangelize and establish ...read more