SeanfhocailIrish proverbs & blessings, sourced

Memorial prints

Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a hanam

May God have mercy on her soul.

The mercy prayer for a woman, set down in a Donegal school copybook in the 1930s by a boy praying for his own mother. Choose it when the piece remembers a mother or grandmother. That is exactly how the manuscripts use it.

Go ndéanaDia trócairear a hanam May God have mercy on her soul. MÁIRE UÍ CHONAILL · 1938–2024 · LOVED AND REMEMBERED Go ndéana Dia trócaire ar a hanamPaidir · Irish prayerSay it: guh NYAY-na JEE-a TROH-kir-eh err a HAH-numNational Folklore Collection · seanfhocail.ie

The wording is quoted exactly from the record and its cited source; personalisation touches only your own names and date, never the Irish.

About this saying

Between 1937 and 1939 the Irish Folklore Commission asked the schoolchildren of Ireland to write down the lore of their own houses. The Schools’ Collection, now half a million manuscript pages. On page 312 of volume 1047, a pupil of Leac Chonaill school in Co. Donegal opened a story he had often heard from his mother with this prayer for her soul, in his own school-copybook spelling. That is the attestation: not a dictionary’s example sentence but the prayer doing its work in a family, written by the person who meant it.

Related prints