Irish blessings for a funeral or memorial

If you are reading this because someone has died: we are sorry, and we will keep this practical. Irish has old, worn-smooth words for exactly this moment. Words that were said at wakes and gravesides for generations before they were ever printed. This page explains what each one means and where it belongs, so that whatever you write or carve says precisely what you intend. Every phrase links to its source.

The prayers: what Irish actually says of the dead

Most traditional Irish memorial wording is prayer rather than blessing, a blessing is offered to someone living, and these ask something of God on behalf of someone who cannot be addressed any more. The plainest is Beannacht Dé lena anam: the blessing of God with his soul; in everyday English, God rest his soul. It is what an Irish speaker says on hearing of a death, and what a sympathy card most naturally carries.

One caution that matters more here than anywhere else on this site: prayers of this kind change their form with the person remembered. The wording above is the form for a man. For a woman, the blessing is Beannacht Dé lena hanam. God rest her soul, and the mercy prayer is Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a hanam. These feminine forms are no modern invention: both are recorded in the National Folklore Collection, written in the 1930s by children of Donegal and Kerry about their own mothers, and each record page shows the manuscript it came from. Before anything is carved or printed in memory of a particular person, check the record for the right form, and if you are at all unsure, ask someone with Irish. Stone does not forgive.

For remembering more than one person: parents together, all the dead of a family, the year’s dead: the traditional form is Go ndéana Dia trócaire orthu, may God have mercy on them. You will hear it at Irish funerals as a spoken response, and it sits naturally at the end of a memorial card’s text.

The best-known graveside prayer of all asks that the soul be at God’s right hand: Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam for a man, Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam for a woman. One honest wrinkle, which each record page states rather than hides: Ó Dónaill’s dictionary happens to illustrate the construction with the plural: may they be at God’s right hand : while the singular forms here are the ones in universal use on memorial cards and headstones. Both pages carry that note, so you can see the state of the evidence exactly as we do.

The proverbs: for the card you write yourself

Alongside the prayers, Irish keeps a small body of proverb about grief, and it consoles the way Irish proverbs generally do: by refusing to pretend. The deepest of them is Níl cara ag cumha ach cuimhne: grief has no friend but memory. It does not say time heals. It says that what remains to you is remembering, and that remembering is a companion. On a memorial card, under a photograph, it is devastating and right.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine: people live in one another’s shelter, is read at Irish funerals as often as at weddings, and means something different at each. At a funeral it says why the loss is structural: a shelter has come down, and the people who stood in it now stand in weather. It suits a eulogy’s closing line, or a card to a family that held everyone else up.

Two more, for particular temperaments. Níl sa saol ach gaoth agus toit (the world is only wind and smoke) is the tradition’s oldest, hardest word on mortality; for the right reader it is exactly true enough to help, and for the wrong one it is too much, so know your recipient. And Is gaire cabhair Dé ná an doras. God’s help is nearer than the door, is for the living rather than the dead: a line for the note that says you will get through this without saying anything so thin.

Choosing between them

For a sympathy card: the short prayer, or the grief proverb if the family is not religious. Irish tradition offers both registers honestly. For a headstone: the fewest words you can, checked twice; the prayers are the traditional choice, and the record pages show exactly how each is attested. For a eulogy: the shelter proverb opens or closes one as well as any sentence in the language. For a mass card or a remembrance of several people together: the plural mercy prayer.

Whatever you choose, take the wording from the record page rather than from memory or from a graphic: the copy button there carries every fada with it, and a dropped fada changes the word. Our memorial wording page gathers all of these with a note on where each belongs, and the sources page explains how each was checked. May the words you choose serve the person they are for.