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<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Darach \u00d3 S\u00e9aghdha<\/p>\n
Author and linguist<\/p>\n
In Calling 353, bestselling Motherfocl\u00f3ir author and podcaster Darach \u00d3 S\u00e9aghdha casts a linguistic eye on how we talk about what it means to be Irish, the signs we post to each other about Irishness \u2013 and what really lies beneath it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
SPOOKY SEASON IS in full swing at the moment, despite certain shops and taverns already putting Christmas decorations up.<\/p>\n
Around the estate where I live, all sorts of plastic ghouls decorate the doors of houses who intend to participate in the scary festivities of late October.<\/p>\n
The neighbourhood WhatsApp group has already flipped from passive-aggressive seething to aggressive-aggressive mayhem as representatives of different parenting styles accuse each other of being The Worst. Maybe they should dress up as each other on the 31st?<\/p>\n
One enduringly popular costume for adults, especially the Mams doling out sweets at the door, is that of the witch.<\/p>\n
Like a Christmas tree, it can be as simple or as elaborate as you like. If Halloween is as Irish as they say, and if the witch is such a timeless cultural motif, then we can expect a similarly enduring word in Irish for witches, can\u2019t we? Well\u2026<\/p>\n
There are actually a few words and terms for witch in Irish, which hint at how the concept wasn\u2019t as rigid here as elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Witch hunts in Ireland did not happen at the scale noted in other European countries or the American places those European countries colonised.<\/p>\n
If you ever want to fall down an internet wormhole, you could do worse than click on The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft<\/a> which is a database of over 4,000 people in Scotland accused of witchery, searchable by name, location, witch-hunter, nature of demonic pact (kissing the devil\u2019s bottom appears to have been popular), ritual objects used, and year.<\/p>\n The critical mass for such a database in Ireland just isn\u2019t there, which leads me to the first Irish term for witch we will discuss today: Bean Ultach, literally meaning an Ulsterwoman.<\/p>\n In Dinneen\u2019s dictionary, the meanings listed for Ultach are \u201cUlster, Ultonian, uncouth, cruel, \u201cwise\u201d (his air quotes, not mine), magical\u201d\u2026 and the Jesuit lexicographer adds that this magical meaning is shared by tuaisceartach (northern).<\/p>\n And in case you thought that if a Bean Ultach was a witch then a teenage witch must be the cail\u00edn version, you\u2019d be wrong: a Cail\u00edn Ult\u00e1in is the name for \u201ca girl frequenting St Ultan\u2019s Pattern\u201d, which was a pilgrimage in Cavan where participants would leave an item of clothing behind<\/a> after visiting a dried out holy well surrounded by whitethorn bushes (which are, of course, not to be trifled with<\/a>).<\/p>\n If you think there\u2019s something spooky and significant about the holy well in question being empty and surrounded by fairy bushes, well you wouldn\u2019t be alone.<\/p>\n Speakers of Ulster Irish don\u2019t call witches that, and it speaks to a universal truth \u2013 the bad people are from somewhere else, and if they\u2019re actually not from somewhere else then we will call the part of here they are from \u201csomewhere else\u201d.<\/p>\n Channel 4 Comedy\n<\/p>\n Consider how Americans resile against using the metric system unless they\u2019re talking about imported drugs \u2013 the foreignness of cocaine and heroin are underlined by their existence in grams and kilos.<\/p>\n We translate the titles of The Three Musketeers and The Little Prince but not Das Kapital or Mein Kampf. If it\u2019s foreign it\u2019s bad, and if it\u2019s bad it\u2019s foreign.<\/p>\n So in the southern parts of Ireland the witches are from Ulster and in the work of the most celebrated English writer, the witches are Scottish. Or are they from Ulster too?<\/p>\n Aye of Newt<\/p>\n The English language doesn\u2019t need much protection, but those who take it upon themselves to do so will often call it \u201cthe language of Shakespeare\u201d.<\/p>\n Their implication is that when a language is lost, a treasury of poetry and wisdom is lost with it. And I agree wholeheartedly, which is why English should be able to exist without erasing other languages!<\/p>\n Recently, Shakespeare in film has been intimately linked to the Irish cultural moment \u2013 Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet, Michael Fassbender in Macbeth and Andrew Scott\u2019s forthcoming film Elsinore.<\/p>\n I suppose Kenneth Branagh has done a bit of Shakespeare too. And the line \u201cI have done the State some service\u201d has such a prominent place in recent Irish history that you\u2019d almost forget the Bard said it first.<\/p>\n Of Shakespeare\u2019s 37 plays, only 13 are set in England (the only one of his works to mention America is, prophetically, The Comedy of Errors).<\/p>\n Most of them were set in places that he and his audiences would never see, and have contributed more to the Anglophone perception of these places than any local achievement \u2013 if someone says \u201ca forest near Athens\u201d, you will think of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream before you think of Mount Parnitha, home to Europe\u2019s only rainforest (even the people who claim it isn\u2019t a \u201ctrue\u201d rainforest consider it to be an ecological wonder in need of protection).<\/p>\n Shakespeare\u2019s plays are a foundational body of work in the Anglosphere and while they speak to the human condition in a powerful and resonant way, they are exotic by design. So what happens when a character who is themselves foreign to audiences meets someone who is foreign to them \u2013 such as three witches?<\/p>\n Macbeth has been translated into Irish, Lowland Scots and Scots Gaelic \u2013 the name Mac Beatha, the son of life, uncovers a new meaning in an old and very familiar text.<\/p>\n And having the witches speak Irish rather than Scots Gaelic in the Scots Gaelic version (and Scots Gaelic in the Lowland Scots version) has been an effective way to establish that spooky difference.<\/p>\n Halloween isn\u2019t far away now and if you do meet a Bean Ultach, do say \u201ccad \u00e9 mar at\u00e1 t\u00fa (k\u2019jay mar a tahtoo) by way of a friendly greeting.<\/p>\n They\u2019re not as scary as the old dictionaries would have you believe \u2013 sure I married one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Darach \u00d3 S\u00e9aghdha Author and linguist In Calling 353, bestselling Motherfocl\u00f3ir author and podcaster Darach \u00d3 S\u00e9aghdha casts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[278696,196764,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-658476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-burn-the-witch","tag-calling-353","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"PastedImage-96727\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792334054_559_.png\")
\n The Derry Girls, having the craic at Halloween. Channel 4 Comedy<\/p>\n