Was your area Irish-speaking when the first Gaeltacht was drawn?

What the colours mean

How the boundaries were drawn

The Gaeltacht has never had a single fixed border. It has been defined several times, by different methods, and each definition was built from Electoral Divisions rather than parishes or townlands.

1. 1925

   Coimisiún na Gaeltachta

   The government set up a Commission under Risteárd Ó Maolchatha (Richard Mulcahy) to establish where Irish was spoken and what the state should do there. In July and August 1925 the Gardaí, already out collecting agricultural statistics, also recorded how many people in each district could speak Irish.

2. 1926

   The Commission reports

   The report, published on 17 August 1926, grouped Electoral Divisions by the share of Irish speakers: 80% or more was Fíor-Ghaeltacht, 25–79% was Breac-Ghaeltacht. The Commission used these bands as a guide and did not apply them mechanically, so a few districts were placed above or below their figures. The national census taken in April 1926 asked about Irish too, and its figures were often lower.

3. 1929

   Housing (Gaeltacht) Act

   The first law to use the word Gaeltacht. It defined the Gaeltacht, for housing grants only, as a schedule of named Electoral Divisions. Some 1925 Breac-Ghaeltacht districts were dropped and some were added on the basis of the 1926 census.

4. 1956

   Gaeltacht Areas Order

   When the Department of the Gaeltacht was created, the Gaeltacht was redrawn much more tightly, by Electoral Division and in places by townland. Most of the former Breac-Ghaeltacht, including the Moy valley and the Ox Mountains, was left out. In Mayo the official Gaeltacht became the areas still recognised today: Iorras, Acaill and Tuar Mhic Éadaigh.

5. 2012

   Gaeltacht Act

   The existing boundaries were kept and divided into Gaeltacht Language Planning Areas, each of which prepares its own language plan.

Reading the map

• It records ability, not daily use. The 1925 question was whether a person could speak Irish. In many Breac-Ghaeltacht districts the speakers were older people, and English was the main language of the household.
• It was not school Irish. Irish became a compulsory subject in national schools only in March 1922, three years before the count, and many teachers could not yet teach it. Adult Gaelic League classes reached relatively few people, mostly in towns. In the rural districts on this map, almost everyone recorded as able to speak Irish in 1925 had learned it at home or in the community from native speakers. The 1926 census tables by age (Table 19) let you check a district: a count built on school Irish would be weighted towards children, while native speech is weighted towards older people. Town figures, such as Castlebar's, are more likely to include some school and adult learners.
• A colour covers a whole Electoral Division. An orange district means 25–79% of its people across the whole district, not in every townland. Irish was often strongest on the hill farms and weakest near towns and roads.
• Towns were counted separately. Urban Districts such as Ballina and Castlebar had their own figures, which is why some towns appear as islands, or as gaps, in the surrounding pattern.
• Absence from the map is not absence of speakers. A district under 25% could still have had dozens of native speakers. Rinn an Eanaigh near Foxford had a fluent speaker recorded on tape in 1968, and another, who had learned Irish from the old people as a child, recorded in 1982.

Recorded where the Gaeltacht is gone

Native speakers from districts that are no longer in the Gaeltacht were recorded from the 1940s into the 1980s. These are some from North Connacht that you can listen to or read today.

Maggie McGiff told the interviewer that she could speak Irish by the age of ten, having picked it up from the old people around her. For the areas that are still Gaeltacht, such as Iorras, Acaill and Tuar Mhic Éadaigh, the recordings run continuously to the present day.

The dialects behind the map

The map shows where Irish was spoken. Darren Ó Riagáin's talk covers what it sounded like: the varieties of Erris, Achill, Tuar Mhic Éadaigh and east Mayo, how they relate to Ulster and Connemara Irish, and the features that set them apart.

Looking further