Peasant Lore from Gaelic Ireland

Contours of colonialism: Gaelic Ireland and the early colonial subject

The sixteenth century is critical to our reading of Ireland’s subsequent colonial and indeed postcolonial geographies, yet has frequently evaded considered scrutiny for a variety of reasons, including the deficiencies of the evidence. Eschewing assumptions of colonialism as a ‘given’ and informed by postcolonial perspectives in geography and related disciplines, this paper interrogates the init...

A Y-chromosome signature of hegemony in Gaelic Ireland.

Seventeen-marker simple tandem repeat genetic analysis of Irish Y chromosomes reveals a previously unnoted modal haplotype that peaks in frequency in the northwestern part of the island. It shows a significant association with surnames purported to have descended from the most important and enduring dynasty of early medieval Ireland, the Ui Neill. This suggests that such phylogenetic predominan...

The civilizing and sportization of Gaelic football in Ireland: 1884–2009.

Over the course of the last 125 years the sport of Gaelic football in Ireland has undergone a sportization and civilizing process as the rules governing the sport became stricter and players developed greater levels of self-control. However, the civilizing of Gaelic football was a particularly fragile and uneven process. The growing social desire to diminish displays of violence was moderated b...

Phonetics in phonology: evidence from Scottish Gaelic preaspiration

Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw what is known today as the Highland Clearances, which was in effect the forced migration of a large proportion of the population of the Scottish Highlands due to intensified sheep farming in the name of a more effective economic land use (Devine, 1999, pp.176-78). For the Gaelic speech community this meant ‘the removal of its heartland’ (Ma...