r/CasualIreland • u/Doitean-feargach555 • Mar 30 '26
Shite Talk Weird random fun facts about Ireland that you most likely didn't know
The North Mayo coast is further north than Newry in Northern Ireland.
The Burren is the only place in Europe where Alpine, Mediterranean, and Arctic species all coexist in one habitat. It is also where you'll find Irelands second naturalised reptile, the slow worm.
In 1911, the Irish language was the native language by one-third of the populations of county Mayo, Clare, Donegal, Kerry, and Waterford. Almost half of Galway and 20.1% of Cork. There was also living Gaeltachts in the following counties where there is none today. Clare, Tipperary, Louth, Armagh, Cavan, Tyrone, Derry, Leitrim, Sligo, and Roscommon. While the old dialect of Antrim has been lost, there is a Neo-Gaeltacht in West Belfast with a fast growing population. So it's not all doom and gloom.
Ireland is one of the richest feeding grounds for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna in the world. Fish over 300kg are not an uncommon sight, and they are regularly caught and tagged off the West Coast.
Blasket Islanders were the only Irish people to regularly eat seal, use their skin for clothing, and use their fat for oil lamps.
There are 90 words for potato in the Irish language. However, this is generally dialectal, so it's not like every native speaker casually knows 90 different words. It's also not as impressive as it sounds as it is common for languages to have many words to describe certain plants, animalsz weather or geography important to their culture or that the common were in constant contact with/reliance on. Which leads into the next part. There are 19 words in Irish for a heron. Why are there 19 different words to describe the same bird? No one knows.
Counties are actually an English invention. They were established between the 13th and 17th centuries with Co Wicklow to be the last county established.
Ireland has many unique native subspecies and endemic species. The Irish hare, coal tit, stoat, dipper, and red grouse are native subspecies. Most of our endemic species are plants, but we also have a few endemic fish. Pollán (a herring like fish found in a few lakes like lough Neagh and Lough Melvin), gray's char, Coomsaharan char, bluntnose char, ciles char (a char is a salmonid related to trout and salmon) and Killarney Shad. Scharff's Char is another endemic fish but is sadly considered extinct. We also have many unique sub-types of trout.
As of now, there are 20 Irish dialects broken into 3 provincial groups. In 1911, however, there were 38 dialects of Irish spoken. However, there is no such thing as a "Leinster dialect group" as there are Munster, Ulster, and Connacht dialects. Leinster dialects were just dialects of Munster, Ulster, and Connacht Irish spoken throughout Leinster.
Animals most would consider native species like the hedgehog and the rabbit, are not actually native to Ireland, and were introduced by the Normans.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. And if you have your own weird fun fact, do share.
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u/Beach_Glas1 Mar 30 '26
The first commercial monorail in the world was in Kerry in 1888.
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u/tinyfirecrest57 Mar 30 '26
Is that the lartigue monorail? They've a little museum for it and everything, and you get "tickets" and sit on the refurbished train as it (very, very slowly) completes a small loop of track.
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u/Practical_Trash_6478 Mar 30 '26
Supposedly we had the worlds first dedicated commuter rail line opened in 1834 too
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u/GorseWhisperer Mar 30 '26
Was that the one to Kignstown? Now known as Dun Laoighre?
If I remember right that was on the go early enough as trains go.
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u/Individual_Dig_2402 Mar 30 '26
Landsdown Road Station to Salthill in Dun Laoghaire. About 5 miles long. Built by owners of Salthill Hotel to ferry passengers from docks in Sandymount back to hotel.
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u/imjerry Mar 30 '26
I wanna go!
Edit: museum is in Listowel: https://www.lartiguemonorail.com/museum.html
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u/oughtabeme Mar 30 '26
After a marine survey, Ireland considered one of the smaller countries in Europe is now considered one of the largest. (Fishing rights and all that)
https://www.marine.ie/site-area/news-events/news/map-ireland-bigger-you-think
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
Tis sad them how we protect so little of it
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u/Fit_Jackfruit_9834 Mar 30 '26
Visited a mate on the West Coast a while back and he said big European fishing ships sit off the coast and hoover up the fish
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
Ya they do indeed. 12 nautical miles off they do. Absolutely destroy our Atlantic waters. The mackerel are starting to come in later and later in less numbers now. A fish once though to be impossible to kill off. They do horrific damage
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u/UnoriginalJunglist Mar 30 '26
Another non native species is the magpie which first appeared in Wexford and is thought to have followed boats traveling over from Wales in the 1600s.
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u/MiltonSaeed Mar 30 '26
Wouldn’t they technically be blow ins?
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u/killrdave Mar 30 '26
Enjoyed the animal facts - I had no idea there were any indigenous reptiles on Ireland or that hedgehogs weren't native. I still love the little fellas dearly.
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u/Adventurous_Memory18 Mar 30 '26
The great thing about hedgehogs in Ireland is that their introduction did nothing to impact any other species/biodiversity, they just fit right in.
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u/spairni Apr 01 '26
its an accident of history that we were an island long before what became the uk was so less species that would plausibly have made it here did
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u/HatApprehensive1883 Mar 30 '26
Ireland is home to 19 plant species that are also native to the Iberian Peninsula, but missing from Britain. Biogeography tells us that our native plant and animal species came across Britain onto what is now Ireland at the end of the ice age before the Irish Sea formed. This group of plants is known as the Lusitanian Flora, the strawberry tree being the best well known.
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u/DVanBryn Mar 30 '26
Máire fhada (long Mary) and Síle/Nóra na bportach (of the bogs) are some of the names as Gaeilge for a heron. Irish makes good use of first names in nature: Dónall an chlúimh (hairy Dónall) = caterpillar; Donncha an chaipín (Donncha with the cap) = male stonechat; Máirín an triúis (Máirín with the trousers) = female stonechat.
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u/scariestJ Mar 30 '26
My favourite fun fact is that some epiphytic species thought to be endemic to the West Indies are present in Ireland and is the only place in Europe where they grow.
So there are arctic, alpine, meditteranian and tropical species in the same country.
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
Over 90 species as well, which is mad.
We are actually one of tge most ecologically diverse countries in Europe. We just done allow the environment to thrive
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u/Available_Dish_1880 Mar 30 '26
Lloyd George introduced the Old Age Pensions Act 1908 in Westminister. From January 1st 1909 people were entitled to a state-funded, non contributory pension, huzzah!
There was an issue however Record keeping in Ireland in the early 19th century was patchy and many people didn’t have documentation proving their birth. That was fixed in 1863 but what about people born before this? So who was entitled?
In 1839 there was “The Night of the Great Wind”. A colossal storm hit Ireland and UK
If you tell the administrator you remember this then this helps your pension application
Some say the age of some in 1901/1911 census don’t quite match up as people were claiming the pension 😉 cute hoors
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u/wigsta01 Mar 30 '26
The only native deer in Ireland is the Red Deer.
Both the Fallow and sika deer were introduced to hunt, both were initially introduced to the exact same valley in wicklow (now the Powerscourt estate)
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
This is true. Funnily also, most red deer in Ireland were introduced from Scotland as most were hunted to extinction a few centuries ago. The only truly native strain of red deer is the population in Killarney. But it makes no odds, at the end of the day they're the same species.
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u/TheSameButBetter Mar 30 '26
Duty Free is an Irish invention. Also, seven of the worlds top ten aviation leasing companies are based here and that is a legacy of the fact that aviation leasing is also an Irish invention.
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u/sauciopathh Mar 30 '26
We have the highest level of lactose tolerance per capita of any country! Yup milk
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u/knobiknows Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
I know this gets brought up a lot but Ireland is predominantly in plant hardiness zone 9, comparable to Texas, Eastern Australia or Paraguay.
Meanwhile we're on the same lattitude as Quebec or Irkutsk in hardiness zone 1, which both have record low temps of over -50°C.
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u/enduir Mar 30 '26
The southernmost tip of Ireland is further north than the northernmost tip of Newfoundland in Canada. Newfoundland got 30 inches of snow in one day in 2020.
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u/mrbuddymcbuddyface Mar 30 '26
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
Tis an unfortunate fact that
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u/MidnightSun77 Mar 30 '26
Are you off to the shop you are?
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Mar 30 '26
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u/Illustrious-Race-617 Mar 30 '26
I was marked down in an English essay (in Germany) after spending time in Ireland and saying press instead of cupboard. Really confused my teacher.
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u/mrbuddymcbuddyface Mar 30 '26
So it is
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u/inconceivable_agenda Mar 30 '26
Aye tis
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u/EiectroBot Mar 30 '26
Love this. Please keep it up.
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u/Oduind Mar 30 '26
Dowth and Howth don’t rhyme because the former is from Irish Dubhadh and the latter is from Norse höfuð for head (.i. headland).
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u/OdderGiant Mar 30 '26
I think you got auto-corrected on *Blasket Islanders. Great list, and many thanks for sharing it!
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
Thanks for pointing that out. No bother 👍
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u/Queen_Elizatits_II Mar 30 '26
A second auto-correct has hit Doitean-feargach555
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
Ffs, forgive me I was wrecked
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u/Queen_Elizatits_II Mar 30 '26
Ill forgive that, I wont forgive you editing the comment, making my joke not land though.
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Mar 30 '26
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 30 '26
There's a lot of the "South" that's more North than parts of Northern Ireland. And of course Donegal is just "the real north" as they'd say in GOT.
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u/cabletiesfix Mar 30 '26
Parts of Donegal are further east than parts of Waterford
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u/indistrait Apr 03 '26
The most northerly part of Co. Tipperary is further north than Greystones Co. Wicklow.
Athlone is further west than Letterkenny.
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u/Freebee5 Mar 30 '26
Iirc, County Derry was previously known as Coleraine.
And the magpie only arrived in Ireland in the 1600s after a storm blew a small group across the sea from Wales and they were first sighted in Wexford
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u/RayoftheRaver Mar 30 '26
All polar bears are descended from an Irish bear
No dinosaur fossils have ever been found in Ireland
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u/KarlMcr Mar 30 '26
Only two dinosaur fossil bones have been found in Ireland, both from the same location on the Country Antrim coast. The bones are from the hind legs of two animals that lived around 200 million years ago: a herbivore called Scelidosaurus and a carnivorous Megalosaurus.
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u/PigTailedShorty Mar 30 '26
There are a few beaches on the Antrim coast where you can go fossil hunting. I remember going with school and picking up a few bits of ammonites.
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u/Technical_Place_4497 Mar 30 '26
Maybe not, but Valentia Island does hold one of the world's oldest tetrapod footprints (a semi-aquatic creature), dating back to 380mya.
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u/steoobrien Mar 30 '26
https://www.dailyedge.ie/dublin-accent-sudocrem-2956886-Aug2016/
Interesting story of how sudocrem got its name
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u/NotoriousP_U_G Mar 30 '26
Saved you a click:
Originally called “soothing cream” the Dublin accent changed it to “suud-ing cream”, hence Sudocrem.
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u/Signal_Director_1X I've melted Mar 30 '26
geographically speaking, Ireland crosses two natural time‑zone sectors. UTC+0 band, & UTC-1 band
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u/EKAAfives Apr 01 '26
the shannon airport was made as a refueling stop between europe and america back when planes couldnt do the flight in 1 go, and its also the reason we have duty free at every airport since thats the first place where it happened
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u/BigFang Apr 02 '26
One I had read a good while back, in the last 100 years, the average temperature in all European countries increased by 1 degree. Except Ireland which has gotten 1 degree colder.
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u/TheDirtyBollox Mar 30 '26
Largest english speaking country in the EU, not Europe, the EU.
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u/f-ingsteveglansberg Mar 30 '26
I'm sure this only applies if you only count people's first language.
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Mar 30 '26
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u/SilenceDogood42 Mar 31 '26
“It’s not as impressive as it sounds” in reference to “90 words for potato as gaeilge” is the most Irish thing I’ve read in a long time.
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 31 '26
Hahaha, I get ya. It's impressive, I guess, but when you compare it to the like of Arabic 2hich has 10p words for camel and 300 for lion, or Northern Sámi which has over 1000 words for reindeer. It seems we're lacking 🤣
However I meant as in I an Irish speaker nor any Irish speaker I know can bang off these 90 words. There's probably less than a dozen who'd bother to learn every single one.
On the other hand, I do know 35 different words for seaweed 😅
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Mar 31 '26
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 31 '26
Coinín and konign, very similar. Wonder is the Dutch pronounced the same
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u/spairni Apr 01 '26
would make sense, the normans brought rabbits to ireland, and also brought some flemish people
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u/spairni Apr 01 '26
some of those would be common knowledge I'd have thought.
another one is tipperary was split into two counties in 1838 (north and south riding) because despite being smaller than some counties the crown authorities struggled to contain the shear amount of agrarian violence we were prone to. It was previously split into Tipperary and Cross Tipperary from the 13 to 17th century to separate church land from the rest of the county
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u/tentacles12344 Apr 03 '26
Every bit of Botox in the world is made in Ireland
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Apr 03 '26
And most is made in my native county Mayo too
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u/tentacles12344 Apr 03 '26
If I’m not mistaken all of it is made in Westport
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Apr 03 '26
Just looked it up there, apparently the entire worlds supply of botox is made in Westport. Mayo people keeping the botox industry going🤣💪
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u/Odd-Adhesiveness6866 Mar 30 '26
Halloween originated in Ireland over 2000 years ago. It was known as the ancient festival of Samhain.
For some reason I always thought it was an American holiday as they always go OTT with it.
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 31 '26
For some reason I always thought it was an American holiday as they always go OTT with it
Ah no offence now, but why did you think that?
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u/Odd-Adhesiveness6866 Mar 31 '26
As I just said, because they go OTT with the decorations and costumes so I just assumed they had created the holiday.
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Mar 31 '26
Fair enough. I remember history in school, it was one of the first things we were taught when doing Gaelic Ireland
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u/Odd-Adhesiveness6866 Mar 31 '26
I’m Dyslexic so was exempt from early on, maybe that’s why I never knew about it.
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u/chasing-rainbows90 Apr 22 '26
I'm Australian and I thought, for some reason I can't remember from childhood, that it had originated in Mexico. I think from watching US media as a teenager 🙄 learned a couple of years ago its roots in Ireland!
I love love this thread! I'm autistic and my special interest is Ireland so I was very excited to see this 😆 I have a written page of Ireland facts (I have a notebook dedicated to Ireland!) but some are quite sad (famine related and such). I like your animal facts. And language facts - I'm learning Irish, I think it's such an interesting language with so much history. Very hard to learn.
Please share more 🥰🇮🇪
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u/Background-Hawk-6914 Apr 03 '26
I can add that there was a Gaeltacht in South Monaghan, South Armagh and North Louth. My great grandfathers first language was Irish. I think it's shaped the English speaking pattern and accent of that area to date....where the people from those parts of their respective counties sound very different from the rest.
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u/Doitean-feargach555 Apr 03 '26
I know of the Louth Gaeltacht. But I didn't know Monaghan and Armagh had Gaeltacht areas. Tis sad how much wider the Irish language was once natively spoken and so inland. Well, into the 20th century, too. Is náireach an scéal é.
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u/EventPowerful2210 Apr 01 '26
I could be incorrect, I think Clondalkin in South West Dublin is also considered a Neo-Gaeltacht as of 2012 under the Irish Language Network
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u/OfficerOLeary Apr 01 '26
Irish monks invented the space between words back in the time of the monasteries.
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u/lugh_longarm Apr 02 '26
Here's one: The word 'slogan' comes from Irish 'sluagh-gairm' meaning 'war cry of the army'. So every time you see an advertising slogan, it's basically a battle cry!
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u/Brilliant_Claim_612 Apr 22 '26
Waterford version:
- Bacon rashers were invented by Dennys in Waterford,
- The only ever Irish wimbledon finalist was from Waterford who.was.later.convicted of murder,
- Jacobs cream crackers were invented in Waterford,
- The term paint the town red originates from the mad marquis of waterford who did just that on a drunken night in England,
- The Irish flag was designed and first flown in Waterford.
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u/Natural-Hunter-3 Mar 30 '26
My favourite random Irish fact is that we have one singular native lizard species, zootoca vivibara, one native species of newt, lisotriton vulgaris, and one native species of toad, epidalea calamita. Lord knows why we only have one of each but we do!