WHY ARE THE IRISH SUCH GOOD TALKERS?

Irish people drinking Guinness

Irish people love talking. It’s a national hobby, especially in a pub accompanied by a pint of Guinness.

Irish people also love to listen. There is great appreciation for anyone with a way with words. This is an unbroken tradition from early Celtic times when different categories of storytellers and poets held positions of great importance at every level of society. 

Until the early, twentieth century, it was still possible to find an old man, called a seanachee, in Irish seanchai, in every rural area, who would entertain the community with the telling and retelling of hundreds of stories and myths of them thousands of years old.

The continuation of a simple rural community life, the lack of books in Irish, and oppressive poverty which made more materialistic pleasures impossible, kept the strong oral tradition alive.

More information: Irish Central

Today, the Irish spend proportionately less money than any other EC nation on clothes, but more on leisure time activities which include a lot of talking.

There is a famous stone set up high in the walls of a castle in Blarney, Co. Cork: 

Every day in summer, hundreds of tourists queue up to kiss this stone, which tradition claims will give them the Irish gift of the gab (talk).

Source: Why do the Irish? by Fiana Griffin

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

Oscar Wilde