Ireland and Irish Culture
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148 free Ireland and Irish Culture trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
36 free Ireland and Irish Culture trivia questions with answers. Ireland packs an improbable amount of story into 32 counties: a 5,000-year-old tomb that catches the solstice sunrise, a brewery on a 9,000-year lease, a sport played with an ash stick and a leather ball. This quiz runs 148 questions across Irish history, language, music, food, sport and landscape. Every answer was verified against a source and linked, so nothing here is folklore dressed up as fact. Ready? Ar aghaidh linn.
30 of 148 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Saint Patrick is said to have used a shamrock to explain which Christian teaching?
Holy Trinity
The Holy Trinity, three persons in one God, matched the plant's three leaves; the story first appears in writing only in 1726, well over a thousand years after Patrick died.
Q 02Before green took over, which colour was linked to Saint Patrick through the Order of St Patrick?
Blue
Blue: founded in 1783, the Order of St Patrick needed a colour unlike the Garter's dark blue and the Thistle's green; orange was judged too sectarian, so its knights wore sky-blue mantles.
Q 03Which present-day country held the first recorded Saint Patrick's Day parade, in 1601?
United States
United States: records show a parade on 17 March 1601 in St. Augustine, then a Spanish colony in Florida; Ireland's own first parade came three centuries later, in Waterford in 1903.
Q 04Light floods the inner chamber of Newgrange through its roof-box at sunrise on which day of the year?
The winter solstice
The winter solstice, the year's shortest day: the Neolithic builders aligned the 19-metre passage so it lights the chamber, and places in the annual lottery are heavily oversubscribed.
Q 05Newgrange is the principal monument of which World Heritage Site complex in County Meath?
Brú na Bóinne
Brú na Bóinne also holds the great mounds of Knowth and Dowth; Newgrange itself looked like a plain grassy mound until labourers digging it for stone uncovered the entrance in 1699.
Q 06In hurling, what is the small ball struck with the stick called?
Sliotar
The sliotar is a cork-cored leather ball; players may carry it in the hand for only four steps, so they run with it balanced on the end of the stick.
Q 07On a hurling scoreboard reading 2-10, what does the first number count?
Goals
Goals come first: a ball under the crossbar into the net is worth three points and one over the bar is worth a single point, so 2-10 adds up to 16 and beats 1-12.
Q 08Hurling fields fifteen players a side, the same as which sport?
Rugby union
Rugby union also fields fifteen a side, against rugby league's thirteen; hurling teams could run to 21 a side under the GAA's first rules and were cut to today's fifteen in 1913.
Q 09The Book of Kells, made around 800 AD, was written in which language?
Latin
Latin: the Book of Kells holds the four Gospels, mostly in the Vulgate text; the Annals of Ulster record that it was stolen for its ornate shrine and found months later under a sod, stripped of its gold.
Q 10Which Dublin institution puts the Book of Kells on public display?
Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin has held the Book of Kells since the 17th century, when it left the town of Kells for the capital; its pages are turned several times a year for conservation.
Q 11Carrauntoohil, the highest mountain in Ireland, rises within which range?
MacGillycuddy's Reeks
MacGillycuddy's Reeks hold all three Irish peaks over 1,000 metres; the steel cross on Carrauntoohil's summit was cut down in 2014 in a protest against the Church and put back up a week later.
Q 12Ireland's highest peak stands on the Iveragh Peninsula, in which county?
Kerry
Kerry: the Iveragh Peninsula is circled by the Ring of Kerry road, and from Valentia Island just off it the first transatlantic telegraph cable was run to Newfoundland in 1858.
Q 13How long was the lease Arthur Guinness signed in 1759 for a disused Dublin brewery?
9,000 years
Q 21The 'uilleann' of the uilleann pipes comes from the Irish word for which body part?
Elbow
Píb uilleann means 'pipes of the elbow', because the player works the bellows with the arm rather than blowing.
Q 22On the uilleann pipes, what is the pipe that plays the melody called?
Chanter
The chanter carries the melody while three drones hold steady notes and keyed regulators add chords; resting its end on the thigh closes the bottom hole, so a piper can cut notes short for a staccato effect.
Q 23Samhain, the Gaelic festival that fed into modern Halloween, marks the start of which season?
Winter
Samhain marks the start of winter, the dark half of the Celtic year. It falls on 1 November, with celebrations beginning the previous evening because the Celtic day started at sunset.
9,000 years, at £45 a year: the lease on the disused brewery ran to the year 10759, but the company later bought the site outright, so it no longer applies.
Q 14At which Dublin site did Arthur Guinness begin brewing ales in 1759?
St James's Gate
St James's Gate began with ales, not stout: Arthur Guinness started selling dark porter in 1778, and the first beers to carry the word 'stout' came only in the 1840s.
Q 15What name is given to the districts where Irish survives as a community language?
Gaeltacht
The Gaeltacht lies mostly along the western seaboard, but it also takes in two pockets of County Meath, settled with Irish-speaking families in the 1930s and added in 1967.
Q 16Which of these letters is missing from the traditional 18-letter Irish alphabet?
W
W is one of eight letters the traditional alphabet leaves out, with j, k, q, v, x, y and z, so they turn up only in loanwords; Viking-founded Wexford is Loch Garman in Irish.
Q 17On a Claddagh ring, what does the crown stand for?
Loyalty
The heart is love, the clasped hands friendship and the crown loyalty. Which way the heart points is said to signal whether the wearer is spoken for.
Q 18The Claddagh ring is named for a fishing village beside which city?
Galway
Galway: Claddagh was a fishing village on the city's edge, and the ring is said to be the work of Richard Joyce, a Galway goldsmith who learned the craft while enslaved in Algiers.
Q 19Phytophthora, the blight behind Ireland's Great Famine, takes its name from Greek for what?
Plant destroyer
Plant destroyer: Phytophthora infestans is a water mould rather than a true fungus, and from 1845 it wrecked successive Irish potato harvests.
Q 20What were the Great Famine's emigrant ships grimly nicknamed?
Coffin ships
Coffin ships earned the name because so many passengers died of disease and hunger on the crossing; thousands of the emigrants of 1847 lie buried at Canada's Grosse Isle quarantine station.
Q 24Which lough, with shores in five of Northern Ireland's six counties, is the largest lake in the British Isles?
Lough Neagh
Lough Neagh is, in legend, the hole left when the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill scooped up a clod of earth to hurl at a rival; the clod landed in the sea and became the Isle of Man.
Q 25Which country joined the EEC with Ireland and Denmark in 1973?
The UK
The UK joined with Ireland and Denmark on 1 January 1973; Norway had been due to join too, until its voters said no in a 1972 referendum.
Q 26Which Irish potato pancake belongs to the northern midlands and Ulster?
Boxty
Boxty mixes finely grated raw potato into the batter and belongs to the north midlands and southern Ulster; an old rhyme warns that if you can't make boxty, you'll never get a man.
Q 27Which Irish author wrote the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula?
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker, born in Clontarf, Dublin, wrote Dracula while managing London's Lyceum Theatre for the actor Henry Irving; he toured the world with Irving yet never visited Eastern Europe, where the novel opens.
Q 28What is the Irish language called in Irish itself?
Gaeilge
Gaeilge is the name used in the constitution's Irish text, which ranks Irish as the national and first official language, ahead of English; Gàidhlig is Scottish Gaelic, Cymraeg Welsh and Kernewek Cornish.
Q 29What is Ireland's national anthem, 'Amhrán na bhFiann', called in English?
"The Soldier's Song"
"The Soldier's Song" came first in English: Peadar Kearney wrote the words and Patrick Heeney the music, and the Irish translation now usually sung is Liam Ó Rinn's later version.
Q 30How many traditional counties make up the entire island of Ireland?
32
32: partition in 1921 put six of the traditional counties in Northern Ireland and left 26 in what became the Republic, yet Gaelic games still run their championships across all of them.