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

WHY ARE THE IRISH SO FRIENDLY?

A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet –Irish proverb.

Irish Folk Session

The friendliness of the Irish is partly due to the fact that there are so few of them, only 3.5 million, so those that can stay here have room to breathe and see each other as human beings.

At the same time, the considerable racial, cultural and religious homogeneity of the Irish gives them a kind of collective security, while their easy-going approach to life allows people time to be friendly towards each other.

When strangers start talking in Ireland, they try to find friends, acquaintances, or distant relatives in common, usually with some success.

More information: Tacomaweekly

They’ll even optimistically try the Do you know so-and-so? ritual with visitors from a country where they happen to know someone.

 That may seem ridiculous, but so many Irish people have gone near and far in every direction, as emigrants and missionaries, that sometimes it seems as if half the world is little more than an Irish colony, 50 million North Americans, including 17 American Presidents, claim Irish descent. 

The Irish feel at home anywhere in the world, and usually enjoy making visitors welcome to their own beautiful country. However, many foreigners feel that the Irish are slow to develop long-term friendships; they seem an open book but are complex, subtle and quite hard to get to know.

Source: Why do the Irish? by Fiana Griffin

May the lilt of Irish laughter lighten every load,

may the mist of Irish magic shorten every road,

may you taste the sweetest pleasures that fortune e're bestowed,
and may all your friends remember all the favors you are owed. 

Popular Irish wish

WHY DO THE IRISH EAT SO MANY POTATOES?

Irish potato famine

Each Irish person eats 141 of potatoes every year -more than any other people. In the 18th and early 19th century they would have eaten a great deal more.

There was a time when every spare inch of land was planted with potatoes. When you're in the countryside, especially in areas where no-one now lives, and all you can see is grass, look closely. You may be able to make out the faint ridges on the land where once potatoes grew up the foothills of mountains, down river banks and out to the edge of the bogs.

More information: BBC

The potato is not native to Ireland. It was brought by Sir Walter Raleigh from the Andes around the end of the 16th century.

It was soon found that the potato grew remarkably well in the cold wet Irish climate, and could feed more people per acre than any other crop. More and more poor labourers could marry young and rear large families. They could live almost entirely on the potatoes they grew on their little patches of rented land.

More information: Discovering Ireland

The disease which destroyed the potato crops of the mid-1840's caused a famine in which over one million people died.

The total dependence of vast numbers of people on the potato was broken by the famine. The survivors and their descendants emigrated rather than face the threat of starvation again.

 More information: Mises Institute

However, to this day, most Irish people feel a little insecure unless some sort of potato turns up on their dinner plate every day.

More information: The Great Famine Part I & Part II

Source: Why do the Irish? by Fiana Griffin

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase 
the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. 
It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, 
once performed, they can never be recuperated. 
What is true of the past will always be true of it.
 

Terry Eagleton