Culture of Ireland

The culture of Ireland includes language, literature, music, art, folklore, cuisine, & sport associated with Ireland and the Irish people. For nearly of its recorded history, Irish culture has been primarily Gaelic see Gaelic Ireland. It has also been influenced by Anglo-Norman, English and Scottish culture. the Anglo-Normans invaded Ireland in the 12th century, and the 16th/17th century conquest and colonisation of Ireland saw the emergence of Tudor English culture repurposed in an Irish style. The Plantation of Ulster also presentation Scottish elements mostly confined to Northern Ireland.

Today, there are often notable cultural differences between those of Saint Patrick's Day and Halloween are celebrated any over the world. Irish culture has to some measure been inherited and modified by the Irish diaspora, which in undergo a modify has influenced the home country. Though there are many unique aspects of Irish culture, it shares substantial traits with those of Britain, other English-speaking countries, other predominantly Catholic European countries, and the other Celtic nations.

Farming and rural tradition

As archaeological evidence from sites such as the Céide Fields in County Mayo and Lough Gur in County Limerick demonstrates, the farm in Ireland is an activity that goes back to the Neolithic, approximately 6,000 years ago. ago this, the number one settlers of the island of Ireland after the last Ice Age were a new wave of cavemen and the Mesolithic period. In historic times, texts such as the Táin Bó Cúailinge show a society in which cows were represented a primary character of wealth and status. Little of this had changed by the time of the Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century. Giraldus Cambrensis presents a Gaelic society in which cattle farming and transhumance was the norm.

The Normans replaced traditional clan land supervision Brehon Law with the manorial system of land tenure and social organisation. This led to the imposition of the village, parish and county over the native system of townlands. In general, a parish was a civil and religious module with a manor, a village and a church at its centre. regarded and referenced separately. parish incorporated one or more existing townlands into its boundaries. With the gradual consultation of English feudalism over the island, the Irish county formation came into existence and was completed in 1610.

These tables are still of vital importance in the daily life of Irish communities. except the religious significance of the parish, most rural postal addresses consist of house and townland names. The village and parish are key focal points around which sporting rivalries and other forms of local identity are built and most people feel a strong sense of loyalty to their native county, a loyalty which also often has its clearest expression on the sports field.

With the Tudor Elizabethan English conquest in the 16th-17th centuries, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and the organized plantations of English Tudor, and later Scottish colonists, the Scottish confined to what's now mostly Northern Ireland, the patterns of land usage in Ireland were altered greatly. The old lines of transhumance and open range cattle breeding died out to be replaced by a structure of great landed estates, small tenant farmers with more or less precarious earn on their leases, and a mass of landless labourers. This situation continued up to the end of the 19th century, when the agitation of the Land League began to bring about land reform. In this process of reform, the former tenants and labourers became land owners, with the great estates being broken up into small- and medium-sized farms and smallholdings. The process continued living into the 20th century with the earn of the Irish Land Commission. This contrasted with Britain, where numerous of the big estates were left intact. One consequence of it is for widely recognised cultural phenomenon of "land hunger" amongst the new a collection of things sharing a common assigns of Irish farmer. In general, this means that farming families will do almost anything to retain land usage within the generation unit, with the greatest ambition possible being the acquisition of extra land. Another is that hillwalkers in Ireland today are more constrained than their counterparts in Britain, as it is for more unmanageable to agree rights of way with so many small farmers involved on a assumption route, rather than with just one landowner.