St Patrick's Day Blessings

St Patrick's Day generates more bad Irish than any other week of the year. Most of what circulates is either invented, machine-translated, or copied from a card until the fadas have fallen off. And a missing fada in Irish is not a typo, it is a different word.

Everything on this page is sourced. Some of it is blessing language you would use to toast someone or wish them luck; some of it is proverb about Ireland, the language, and luck. None of it was written for a greeting card.

If you want one line for a card or a post, Go gcuire Dia an t-ádh ort (may God send you luck) is short, real, and pronounceable. If you want something about the language itself, the tradition is well supplied, and there is a reason for that: the proverbs about Irish were mostly recorded at the point when people were worried about losing it.